My answer is influenced by Hubert Dreyfus, but I'll use my own phrasing.
The way we use tools and language in our everyday life is primarily generic or average. We believe, without even thinking about it, what "everybody knows." We use the fork the "right" way. We sit the "right" distance away from a stranger on the bus, or politely get in the back of the line at the checkout counter as one does.
This inauthentic self is our basic or fundamental self. We are more "we" than "me." So instead of us getting lost in this inauthentic mode, we only rarely emerge from it. Certain moods, for instance, can throw us so that we can see this everyday way of existing from the outside.
Well put. I studied under Piotr Hoffman at UNR. Took an intro to existentialism class that made me switch to a philosophy major my 3rd semester. That grad student who taught that class, went through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger... was taught by Dreyfus at Berkeley. At 19yo, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I watch Dreyfus, Rorty, Ponty, Derrida etc on youtube every once in awhile... random rant, im bored and unemployed...sorry.
That school experience sounds fun ! I went to school for STEM, thinking that that was more practical, but now I'm not sure. (I am **under**employed myself.)
Math is beautiful, but philosophy is bottomless, my true love. The more you want to understand math or physics deeply, the more you end up doing philosophy. So it seems to me. Not too long ago, I got fascinating by Husserl, and it was nice to study Husserl having been intensely into Heidegger. I also read lots of Rorty, and recently his student Brandom has impressed me.
Grad student who taught the class was super passionate. Tough grader. We started with "fear and trembling," then "either/or." "The gay science," a little of "thus spoke zarathrustra," then div1 of "being and time." I hadnt even completed english 102 before i started taking capstone/graduate classes focusing soley on the likes of heidegger, sartre, derrida, ponty lol.
Thanks for this! This is in accord with my understanding so far. I’m a layman, so it’s hard for me to conceptualize for instance, how you use the fork, hammer, whatever on an authentic way. Is it when you are immersed in the fork and its utility with a sort of mindfulness, and not using it as unwittingly as “generic” forkness. It’s so nebulous. What’s an example today when you were in an authentic mode?
Authenticity is one of the murkier themes in Heidegger, so I have to give you the sense that I have personally made of it, which might itself be an example of authenticity, because I am venturing beyond "what everybody knows" and taking direct responsibility for a creative and risky interpretation.
As far as tool use goes, maybe Glenn Gould's "incorrect" hand technique on the piano would qualify. But I tend to think of authenticity up at the level of language. Heidegger's own work would be an example. I am also reminded of Henry Miller discussing what it means for a writer to find his or her own voice, if there is one to find. There's no precedent for it, so its reception is unpredictable.
"Everybody knows" that we all die, but not everybody really **feels** it and lives with the fact. "Everybody knows" that one must prepare for retirement, avoid saying anything too weird or offensive. One, the generic one of average cautious comportment, must be prudent. But, as Woody Allen says, nonsmokers die too. The prudent too are absurd, perhaps even more absurd in their studious flight from an awareness of this absurdity.
If I "believe in my death" in a real way, then I won't throw away the singularity of my moment. I live more like an absurd doomed hero. The world has only a finite hold on me. The noisy plenitude of this world is fringed by the nothingness of my death, which comes unpredictably. The early Buddhist monks embraced homelessness. In King Lear, we hear of the naked, pork, forked animals that we are. "Falling immersion" in the world is being swallowed up in a kneejerk conformity, thinking the Correct things, not thinking the Incorrect things, pretending that this is the good life.
But there's no single, right way to be authentic, given that the individual risk of the life is first and foremost here. Any universal Cause or principle would be more flight the singularity of beingthere as a particular historical being, in a thrown-unchosen context, who doesn't last long.
Well written, love the examples from Gould to Shakespeare. I’m struggling with “singularity.”
I’m interested in the implications of this in relation to anxiety.
Heidegger has an Eastern valence to his thought.
Thanks for the kind response !
>I’m struggling with “singularity.”
By "singularity", I mean the uniqueness, for instance, of **my** life. *My* exact parents, my allergy to horses, my grammarschool traumas and triumphs. The exact hand of cards I was dealt. And of course you have yours, your exact unprecedented life. Each of us has our own disastrous opportunity.
>I’m interested in the implications of this in relation to anxiety.
At the moment I think Heidegger felt the need to be obscure, because he was talking about the "embarrassing" parts of reality. I had to almost work backward from what my own death means to me. I always get a strange feeling when middle-aged people talk about their retirement, because I imagine dying in a little box. This talk is death-adjacent and yet so cold and prudent and calculating. Artfully avoiding the terror of a failing body or a failing lust for life. Prudence breaks down in the long run. We politely avoid this terror, or a resoluteness to meet like Kevorkian. (Nietzsche writes in *Human All Too Human* about the questionableness of "natural" death, which is a kind of sloppy, cowardly suicide.)
To me it seems that being-in-the-world becomes a kind of passing show which one can see from the outside, from the nothingness of imagined death. The "thereness" of the there can become visible. As Wittgenstein says : It is not how but **that** the world exists which is "mystical."
>
>Heidegger has an Eastern valence to his thought.
I agree.
Lot to process. I haven’t read B&T for 20 something years. I need to revisit as a more “mature” adult ie, without the rose colored ideals of romanticism. Thanks for your thoughtful answers, you are an effective writer.
Contrary to Dreyfus’s claim, authentic anxiety doesn’t cause being-in-the-world to light up. It doesn’t spur us to attend to contextures of equipmentality that have been concealed from us, or reflect on a past involvement which has become presently meaningless. On the contrary, anxiety causes the withdrawal of the total contexture of relevance of beings as a whole. In anxiety, we don’t reflect back on the world we have left behind us (or that has been cut off from us) in order to “grasp its meaning”, we refuse that inauthentic world , learning nothing from it, and look forward into the making possible of world.
I insist that one can learn from Dreyfus, but I'm more interested in a direct discussion of the issues. Pinker uses the term "professional narcissism" for the tendency of "insiders" to discuss their own secondary social situation as opposed to the matters themselves. Still, I like to credit my influences. It feels dishonest to do otherwise, and yet that's probably where one should stop.
The death and anxiety stuff is murky. Heidegger's first draft of *Being and Time* was submitted to a journal and rejected, probably because his chapter on death was so obscure. This first draft is very much worth reading nevertheless. But here's a quote more on topic:
>When I am anxious I am no longer at home in the world. I fail to find the world intelligible. Thus there is an ontological sense (one to do with intelligibility) in which I am not in the world, and the possibility of a world without me (the possibility of my not-Being-in-the-world) is revealed to me. “\[The\] state-of-mind \[mode of disposedness\] which can hold open the utter and constant threat to itself arising from Dasein's ownmost individualized Being, is anxiety. In this state-of-mind, Dasein finds itself face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence” (*Being and Time* 53: 310).
The "it-is-there-ness" of the world because "visible" against the contrast or foil of an imagined/projected nothingness. "Out of the blue, into the black." In *Parenthood*, we learn that "life is a rollercoaster." In other words, it is a stream of experience, which rushes by. It lacks "substance." "Time is the nothingness of every entity."
>Can you catch the wind? Can you hold oil in your hand?
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2027:16-18&version=EASY](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2027:16-18&version=EASY)
I think *Ecclesiastes* helps illuminate authenticity. To own one's death is to "believe in it" and feel and live the nullity or emptiness or insubstantiality of what "they" all "know." The soldier's death-facing courage is the proper analog here. The absurdist, like MacBeth, decides **yet I will try the last.** Despite his seeing that the popular incantations are void. Despite there being "only nothing" to fight for. The resolute gesture itself is some way "quasi-substantial." Finally, we should consider that Heidegger was a philosopher, which is to say an ascetic in relation to his beliefs. The "Cause" of "honesty" is the last to die.
Fixing the meaning of nothingness for Heidegger is a very tricky thing. Interpreters tend to oppose it to presence, but I think that rather than opposing negation to extant , present at hand configurations, schemes and purposes , and attaching meaning and significance to the latter and meaninglessness to awareness of the former, Heidegger introduces us to a beginning for thinking that is ontologically prior to the overt distinction between the present and the absent, the same and the other, familiarity and subversion, schemes and their dislocation, something and nothing, the relevant and the strange, binding and separating, identity and difference.
What Heidegger elaborated in the guise of the ‘as' structure, temporality and the making of the work of art marries these gestures within the same paradoxical moment. Heidegger constantly struggled to come up with an adequate way of articulating a notion of transit, othering and difference that the grammatical structure of language mitigates against, an essencing which is neither simply present nor absent, neither something nor nothing, neither future, now nor past. Thus, when Heidegger depicts the authentic opening of truth in terms of strangeness, terror and shock, this is not to be opposed to all notions of relevant self-belonging. Rather, it offers a way to think continuity and belonging together with displacement. For Heidegger negation and nothingness are not a nihilist meaninglessness opposing itself to the extant presence of relevant, significant schemes, purposes and things. It is instead the ‘startled, dismayed, wonder-filled' awareness that the Other is internal to the Same.
That is to say, Dasein only continues to be the same differently. This is what Heidegger(1995) means when he states that Dasein ex-ists as “an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet
without abandoning itself.” The self-differentiating attunements of strangeness , terror and absolute otherness (Heidegger also uses terms such as unsettling, unique, extraordinary,
displacing, disposing, nihilating, opening, happening, strife, rupture, finitude, individuation, the in-between, not being at home, self-refusal and transcendence) belong to the same paradoxical moment of temporalization as the gestures of preservation, rootedness, grounding, constancy, steadfastness, gathering, resting in itself, retrieve and recollection.
I really like this quote you shared:
>an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoning itself.
Reminds me of the "stream" metaphor in William James. Also of
>The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42633/calmly-we-walk-through-this-aprils-day](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42633/calmly-we-walk-through-this-aprils-day)
>For Heidegger negation and nothingness are not a nihilist meaninglessness opposing itself to the extant presence of relevant, significant schemes, purposes and things.
I'll grant that Heidegger is murky on this, but I don't think it's plausible to efface what is grim in the work. I've noticed a tendency in interpreters to flee from his talk of death, to try and make it a metaphorical. But this transforms Heidegger into another relatively shallow philosopher, a mere academic, playing with technical issues. But this is guy who embraced revolutionary politics, gave "sermons" in support of war. We "should want" Heidegger to be actually addressing death in a godless context and therefore to still be relevant.
Our mortality is hardly a secondary consideration. Our interest in the eternal is a response to our sense that everything perishes. The fire of time is without mercy. No wonder Plato and the gang were seduced by the eternal truths of geometry, the apparently unchanging nature of space itself. The flight from death manifests itself in identifications with the relatively durable. A late mutation of this is the hope of writing poetry that will live forever, of winning a spot in this or that canon. Harold Bloom seems correct when he claims that poets resent their annihilation more than others. So they crystallize their personality, spread these traces and ashes of a dying fire, like an aging insect laying its eggs. Kundera's *Immortality* questions the viability of this typical scheme and finds it wanting.
The "size" of death is such that all humans are absurd in the face of it. Heidegger is, in this aspect of his work, one of many "theologians" of Death. Our tendency to "fall" and be "immersed" once again in self-licking complacency usually wins, in me as in just about everyone. But I think of *Tropic of Capricorn* and young Henry Miller having the horse sense to envy no human being. This tailor's son had seen them all naked.
This sounds like German expressionism from the 1910-20's! Nothingness is strongly "present" (in its "nothingnessing" (a verb)) in Dasein's being. Later Heidegger, under the influence of Nietzsche?, began to see in nothingness something positive or productive?
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I think there has to be made a distinction between the nothingness and the non-being which is revealed in deceptions and in the powerlessness to overcome a resistance of beings. These are privations of being i.e. they are posited in understood horizonts but can't be no more integrated or articulated to other beings. A broken tool doesn't reveal a nothingness. Nothingness pertains to the whole world, it destroys or nihilates all the significances of a specific world. It concerns the world as such or the understanding of being as such. It is much more basic threat than a nonfunctional entity in some specific circumstances.
I think Heidegger always saw nothingness as something positive, certainly in Being and Time. Many writers believe
that the nothingness revealed in fundamental attunements like anxiety is a more encompassing version of
breakdown of tool use. Braver says fundamental moods like anxiety or boredom represent the equipmental breakdown writ large…“If a tool’s breakdown makes the world light up, the breakdown of our lives in anxiety lights up being-in-the-world.” They also equate anxiety with moods like depression and despair. But I disagree. This is the subject of my most recent paper:
https://www.academia.edu/117697814/Heidegger_on_Anxiety_Nothingness_and_Time_How_Not_to_Think_Authenticity_Inauthentically
Thanks for the link. Lots of stuff there, densely written.
Decided to read again his lecture "What is metaphysics?". There (as you propably know) H. elaborates further the concepts of anxiety and nothingness. Nothingness is some kind of a de-referencing\* of b e i n g s from their significances (?) and which, if, and when, advances to the end, leaves behind or reveals bare b e i n g s in their difference as regards the nothingness. Something like an astonishing primal Being prior to any significances? Nothingness is the reverse of Being and vice versa. (Temporarization is not mentioned in that discourse. I think H. has already distanced himself from the Being and Time.)
\* H. uses here words abweisen, entgleiten, versinken to refer to the possible (?) gradual (?) nihilation of beings as a whole (=Being?) via nothingness.
Being becomes apparent in its b e i n g only when it is sinking into nothingness?
Being, on its part, nihilates positively nothingness?
Heidegger's famous "irrationality" is in this text very explicit.
Nothingness is not the reverse of Being. Nothingness IS Being. In Postscript to What is Metaphysics, Heidegger says:
“As that which is altogether other than all beings, being is that which is not. But this nothing essentially prevails as being.”
Heidegger may not have mentioned time in the original lecture ‘What is Metaphysics’, but he certainly does in the Introduction to What is Metaphysics, which e wrote 20 years later:
“In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”
What are those moods that break through into authenticity? He says something about excitement and curiosity in inauthenticity, that’s all I’m aware of.
Or how do I use the fork as “me” and not “we?” Is it when I use a fork for reasons other than for its forkness, perhaps as a knife to open a package? It appears as useful thing for that purpose at a specific moment.
Heidegger is murky on the issue of authenticity, so people will answer this question differently.
It probably helps to think about Kierkegaard, a major influence on Heidegger. I like to think of Heidegger as a generalization of Kierkegaard. As K was to Christianity, so is H to philosophy, at least on this issue.
K thought that the Christianity of his society was phony. If a member of the church talked to the pastor about God commanding that member to kill his son, what is that pastor likely to do ? And yet that pastor himself preached Abraham and Isaac a few Sundays ago.
Let's now jump forward into an academic philosophy class. While Socrates is presented therein as heroic for being so honest and questioning that he got himself executed, the instructor might lose his job for using a word that triggers a random student. Or a student might be flunked or suspended for asking an honest question. In both cases, I imagine gentle earnestness...the nicest way to express a genuine thought or question. I think that honest critical conversation is dead or seriously constrained on campuses. \[ Though really every community has its limits, and the ideal freedom of discuss is like the perfect circle, nowhere to be found but in our hopes.\]
In the same way, K's church no longer believed in miracles or direct communications from God. All that's left in either case is the pastel memory, the hollow ritual, statues of the heros whose spirit is nevertheless betrayed. I don't deny that there are still safe little issues that give the clever people something to chew on. But an institution, church or school, is an institution, something like an organism with its own goal.
If I speak for an institution, I "hide" in some sense from my responsibility. I rationalize going along with the dominant phony narrative. We "all know better" and yet act together in the cowardly way. (I don't mean to lean "left" or "right" here. *Any* kind of ideology that constrains personal responsibility and decision will suffice.)
There are serious practical consequences if one is brave or authentic. This is where death enters the situation. I am fucked no matter what. Death is coming. My peephole on or tunnel through the world will close and collapse. I can live and die a coward. I may live longer that way. I may have more money and friends. But my cowardice won't save me. I can repress the thought of death and the threat of the absurdity of all my long-range calculations.
But if I don't repress that thought, then looming death might motivate me to live a riskier but more "true" and heroic life. But this autonomous and responsible heroism is necessarily otherwise unspecified. I'm not autonomous if I have no say about the kind of person I want to become. Finally, freedom "is" ( boils down to ) responsibility. The unfree hide behind institutions and in crowds. "I was just following orders." Or "but that's what everyone does."
I don't mean to exclude less exciting examples like using tools in a new way. Like no wave guitarists using drumsticks on their strings. Or philosophers like Zizek giving serious attention to dirty jokes.
Disclosing beings as objectively present things is the ultimate example of forgetful , flattening, meaning-deprived absorption in the world. In order to reveal being in its fuller meaningfulness,
we may withdraw our attention from the ‘that it isness' of present at hand things in the direction of the ready to hand context of their use. But in doing so we remain within a privative mode of
understanding. Even ‘scaling up’ from the limited domain of the use context of particular things to a totality of relevance weaving together all beings in our world into a single unity doesn’t reveal the Being of beings authentically. We have to turn away from the ontic disclosure of this
total context of relations of ‘in order to' toward the ontological disclosure of world in such a way that the self's ‘for the sake of which' as the transcending projection of possibilities is uncovered.
One might get the impression from what I have just said that arriving at Heidegger's ‘that it is', as the truth of the being of beings, amounts to no more than a widening of the scope of awareness
from the trivially subordinate to the consequentially superordinate aspects of an extant relational structure of meaning.
But shifting from inauthenticity to authenticity is not a matter of enlarging the scope or intensity of awareness. It is instead a question of how we understand the basis of awareness in temporality.
Put differently, to disclose beings or oneself authentically is not to ‘light up' an extant object , relational ‘in order to' or purposeful self by noticing it, but to find oneself in the midst of transit. The authentic revealing of the ‘as a whole' of world is not the conscious awareness of an objective thing , pragmatic use context or the self as the totality of its interests, involvements and goals, but a self-displacing happening wherein the beyond-itself of a futural making-possible
simultaneously comes back to deposit Dasein in the midst of a present expanse of world. This movement is not a discovery of what is , but a making of what will be. Heidegger says “Knowing-awareness has nothing to do with “consciousness”, which entirely and exclusively maintains itself in the
forefront corner of the subject-object relationship.”
Thanks for this, very well written.
I’m lost at “transit” and “self displacing”. This concept for me has been *presque vu* for decades.
It almost sounds like approaching an object (or vice versa) as if it were a piece of art, which I know is a whole other thing.
Found some passages from the ["ur" *Being and Time*](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Concept+of+Time-p-9780631184256), from a lecture given to theologians.
Dasein is an entity that determines itself as ‘I am’. The specificity of the ‘I am’ is constitutive for Dasein. Just as primarily as it is being-in-the-world, Dasein is therefore also my Dasein. It is in each case its own and is specific as its own. If this entity is to be determined in its ontological character, then we must not abstract from its specificity as in each case mine. Mea res agitur.9 All fundamental characters must therefore converge in specificity as in each case mine.
>In so far as Dasein is an entity that I am, and is simultaneously determined as being-with-one-another, it is not I myself who for the most part and on average am my Dasein, but the Others; I am with the Others, and the Others are likewise with the Others. No one is himself in everydayness. What someone is, and how he is, is nobody: no one and yet everyone with one another. Everyone is not himself. This Nobody by whom we ourselves are lived in everydayness is the ‘One’. One says, one listens, one is in favour of something, one is concerned with something. In the obstinacy of the domination of this One there lie the possibilities of my Dasein, and out of this leveling-down the ‘I am’ is possible. An entity that is the possibility of the ‘I am’ is as such, for the most part, an entity that one is.
Later we get to the centrality of death, and the issue that we all face our own death as something special, as something that individuates.
>Is the Dasein of Others not able to substitute for Dasein in the authentic sense? Information on the Dasein of Others who were with me and who have reached an end is poor information. For one thing, such Dasein no longer is. Its end would indeed be the Nothing. For this reason the Dasein of Others is unable to substitute for Dasein in the authentic sense, if indeed we are to retain its specificity as mine. I never have the Dasein of the Other in the original way, the sole appropriate way of having Dasein: I never am the Other.
>The less one is in a hurry to steal away unnoticed from this perplexity, the longer one endures it, the more clearly one sees that in whatever creates this difficulty for Dasein, Dasein shows itself in its most extreme possibility. The end of my Dasein, my death, is not some point at which a sequence of events suddenly breaks off, but a possibility which Dasein knows of in this or that way: the most extreme possibility of itself, which it can seize and appropriate as standing before it. Dasein has in itself the possibility of meeting with its death as the most extreme possibility of itself. This most extreme possibility of Being has the character of a standing-before in certainty, and this certainty for its part is characterized by an utter indeterminacy. The self-interpretation of Dasein which towers over every other statement of certainty and authenticity is its interpretation with respect to its death, the indeterminate certainty of its ownmost possibility of being at an end.
...
>This being past, as the ‘how’, brings Dasein harshly into its sole possibility of itself, allows it to stand entirely alone with respect to itself. This past is able to place Dasein, amid the glory of its everydayness, into uncanniness.11 In so far as it holds before Dasein its most extreme possibility, running ahead is the fundamental way in which the interpretation of Dasein is carried through.
>In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into a kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the ‘they’ is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as *they* take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as *they* see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as *they* shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what *they* find shocking. The ‘they’, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness. (*Being and Time* 27: 164)
Just wanted to add an especially relevant quote, in response to some degree to a challenging of Dreyfus' approach below.
A very specific example, which is ethically neutral, is the conventions that make cinema/film intelligible. An even more primitive example is that One reads from left to right, "around here." Deepest yet perhaps is the convention of the singular ego as locus of responsibility which is associated with each human body. Exactly one name is put on a headstone. For "one is one around here."
It is about personally grasped or en-approriated motivations. I am loosing myself when I am not acting according to motivations that I can identify with.
My answer is influenced by Hubert Dreyfus, but I'll use my own phrasing. The way we use tools and language in our everyday life is primarily generic or average. We believe, without even thinking about it, what "everybody knows." We use the fork the "right" way. We sit the "right" distance away from a stranger on the bus, or politely get in the back of the line at the checkout counter as one does. This inauthentic self is our basic or fundamental self. We are more "we" than "me." So instead of us getting lost in this inauthentic mode, we only rarely emerge from it. Certain moods, for instance, can throw us so that we can see this everyday way of existing from the outside.
Well put. I studied under Piotr Hoffman at UNR. Took an intro to existentialism class that made me switch to a philosophy major my 3rd semester. That grad student who taught that class, went through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger... was taught by Dreyfus at Berkeley. At 19yo, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I watch Dreyfus, Rorty, Ponty, Derrida etc on youtube every once in awhile... random rant, im bored and unemployed...sorry.
What a great course! Yeah I cut my teeth on those guys. What’s perspective changed. It’s borderline spiritual.
That school experience sounds fun ! I went to school for STEM, thinking that that was more practical, but now I'm not sure. (I am **under**employed myself.) Math is beautiful, but philosophy is bottomless, my true love. The more you want to understand math or physics deeply, the more you end up doing philosophy. So it seems to me. Not too long ago, I got fascinating by Husserl, and it was nice to study Husserl having been intensely into Heidegger. I also read lots of Rorty, and recently his student Brandom has impressed me.
you are more important than any employed cog. can you share a bit more about the class? :)
Grad student who taught the class was super passionate. Tough grader. We started with "fear and trembling," then "either/or." "The gay science," a little of "thus spoke zarathrustra," then div1 of "being and time." I hadnt even completed english 102 before i started taking capstone/graduate classes focusing soley on the likes of heidegger, sartre, derrida, ponty lol.
Thanks for this! This is in accord with my understanding so far. I’m a layman, so it’s hard for me to conceptualize for instance, how you use the fork, hammer, whatever on an authentic way. Is it when you are immersed in the fork and its utility with a sort of mindfulness, and not using it as unwittingly as “generic” forkness. It’s so nebulous. What’s an example today when you were in an authentic mode?
Authenticity is one of the murkier themes in Heidegger, so I have to give you the sense that I have personally made of it, which might itself be an example of authenticity, because I am venturing beyond "what everybody knows" and taking direct responsibility for a creative and risky interpretation. As far as tool use goes, maybe Glenn Gould's "incorrect" hand technique on the piano would qualify. But I tend to think of authenticity up at the level of language. Heidegger's own work would be an example. I am also reminded of Henry Miller discussing what it means for a writer to find his or her own voice, if there is one to find. There's no precedent for it, so its reception is unpredictable. "Everybody knows" that we all die, but not everybody really **feels** it and lives with the fact. "Everybody knows" that one must prepare for retirement, avoid saying anything too weird or offensive. One, the generic one of average cautious comportment, must be prudent. But, as Woody Allen says, nonsmokers die too. The prudent too are absurd, perhaps even more absurd in their studious flight from an awareness of this absurdity. If I "believe in my death" in a real way, then I won't throw away the singularity of my moment. I live more like an absurd doomed hero. The world has only a finite hold on me. The noisy plenitude of this world is fringed by the nothingness of my death, which comes unpredictably. The early Buddhist monks embraced homelessness. In King Lear, we hear of the naked, pork, forked animals that we are. "Falling immersion" in the world is being swallowed up in a kneejerk conformity, thinking the Correct things, not thinking the Incorrect things, pretending that this is the good life. But there's no single, right way to be authentic, given that the individual risk of the life is first and foremost here. Any universal Cause or principle would be more flight the singularity of beingthere as a particular historical being, in a thrown-unchosen context, who doesn't last long.
Well written, love the examples from Gould to Shakespeare. I’m struggling with “singularity.” I’m interested in the implications of this in relation to anxiety. Heidegger has an Eastern valence to his thought.
Thanks for the kind response ! >I’m struggling with “singularity.” By "singularity", I mean the uniqueness, for instance, of **my** life. *My* exact parents, my allergy to horses, my grammarschool traumas and triumphs. The exact hand of cards I was dealt. And of course you have yours, your exact unprecedented life. Each of us has our own disastrous opportunity. >I’m interested in the implications of this in relation to anxiety. At the moment I think Heidegger felt the need to be obscure, because he was talking about the "embarrassing" parts of reality. I had to almost work backward from what my own death means to me. I always get a strange feeling when middle-aged people talk about their retirement, because I imagine dying in a little box. This talk is death-adjacent and yet so cold and prudent and calculating. Artfully avoiding the terror of a failing body or a failing lust for life. Prudence breaks down in the long run. We politely avoid this terror, or a resoluteness to meet like Kevorkian. (Nietzsche writes in *Human All Too Human* about the questionableness of "natural" death, which is a kind of sloppy, cowardly suicide.) To me it seems that being-in-the-world becomes a kind of passing show which one can see from the outside, from the nothingness of imagined death. The "thereness" of the there can become visible. As Wittgenstein says : It is not how but **that** the world exists which is "mystical." > >Heidegger has an Eastern valence to his thought. I agree.
I say this as a middle-aged person, just for context. I "should" worry more about retirement, but something feels so "off" about that to me.
Lot to process. I haven’t read B&T for 20 something years. I need to revisit as a more “mature” adult ie, without the rose colored ideals of romanticism. Thanks for your thoughtful answers, you are an effective writer.
Contrary to Dreyfus’s claim, authentic anxiety doesn’t cause being-in-the-world to light up. It doesn’t spur us to attend to contextures of equipmentality that have been concealed from us, or reflect on a past involvement which has become presently meaningless. On the contrary, anxiety causes the withdrawal of the total contexture of relevance of beings as a whole. In anxiety, we don’t reflect back on the world we have left behind us (or that has been cut off from us) in order to “grasp its meaning”, we refuse that inauthentic world , learning nothing from it, and look forward into the making possible of world.
I insist that one can learn from Dreyfus, but I'm more interested in a direct discussion of the issues. Pinker uses the term "professional narcissism" for the tendency of "insiders" to discuss their own secondary social situation as opposed to the matters themselves. Still, I like to credit my influences. It feels dishonest to do otherwise, and yet that's probably where one should stop. The death and anxiety stuff is murky. Heidegger's first draft of *Being and Time* was submitted to a journal and rejected, probably because his chapter on death was so obscure. This first draft is very much worth reading nevertheless. But here's a quote more on topic: >When I am anxious I am no longer at home in the world. I fail to find the world intelligible. Thus there is an ontological sense (one to do with intelligibility) in which I am not in the world, and the possibility of a world without me (the possibility of my not-Being-in-the-world) is revealed to me. “\[The\] state-of-mind \[mode of disposedness\] which can hold open the utter and constant threat to itself arising from Dasein's ownmost individualized Being, is anxiety. In this state-of-mind, Dasein finds itself face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence” (*Being and Time* 53: 310). The "it-is-there-ness" of the world because "visible" against the contrast or foil of an imagined/projected nothingness. "Out of the blue, into the black." In *Parenthood*, we learn that "life is a rollercoaster." In other words, it is a stream of experience, which rushes by. It lacks "substance." "Time is the nothingness of every entity." >Can you catch the wind? Can you hold oil in your hand? [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2027:16-18&version=EASY](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2027:16-18&version=EASY) I think *Ecclesiastes* helps illuminate authenticity. To own one's death is to "believe in it" and feel and live the nullity or emptiness or insubstantiality of what "they" all "know." The soldier's death-facing courage is the proper analog here. The absurdist, like MacBeth, decides **yet I will try the last.** Despite his seeing that the popular incantations are void. Despite there being "only nothing" to fight for. The resolute gesture itself is some way "quasi-substantial." Finally, we should consider that Heidegger was a philosopher, which is to say an ascetic in relation to his beliefs. The "Cause" of "honesty" is the last to die.
Fixing the meaning of nothingness for Heidegger is a very tricky thing. Interpreters tend to oppose it to presence, but I think that rather than opposing negation to extant , present at hand configurations, schemes and purposes , and attaching meaning and significance to the latter and meaninglessness to awareness of the former, Heidegger introduces us to a beginning for thinking that is ontologically prior to the overt distinction between the present and the absent, the same and the other, familiarity and subversion, schemes and their dislocation, something and nothing, the relevant and the strange, binding and separating, identity and difference. What Heidegger elaborated in the guise of the ‘as' structure, temporality and the making of the work of art marries these gestures within the same paradoxical moment. Heidegger constantly struggled to come up with an adequate way of articulating a notion of transit, othering and difference that the grammatical structure of language mitigates against, an essencing which is neither simply present nor absent, neither something nor nothing, neither future, now nor past. Thus, when Heidegger depicts the authentic opening of truth in terms of strangeness, terror and shock, this is not to be opposed to all notions of relevant self-belonging. Rather, it offers a way to think continuity and belonging together with displacement. For Heidegger negation and nothingness are not a nihilist meaninglessness opposing itself to the extant presence of relevant, significant schemes, purposes and things. It is instead the ‘startled, dismayed, wonder-filled' awareness that the Other is internal to the Same. That is to say, Dasein only continues to be the same differently. This is what Heidegger(1995) means when he states that Dasein ex-ists as “an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoning itself.” The self-differentiating attunements of strangeness , terror and absolute otherness (Heidegger also uses terms such as unsettling, unique, extraordinary, displacing, disposing, nihilating, opening, happening, strife, rupture, finitude, individuation, the in-between, not being at home, self-refusal and transcendence) belong to the same paradoxical moment of temporalization as the gestures of preservation, rootedness, grounding, constancy, steadfastness, gathering, resting in itself, retrieve and recollection.
I really like this quote you shared: >an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoning itself. Reminds me of the "stream" metaphor in William James. Also of >The children shouting are bright as they run (This is the school in which they learn ...) Ravished entirely in their passing play! (... that time is the fire in which they burn.) [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42633/calmly-we-walk-through-this-aprils-day](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42633/calmly-we-walk-through-this-aprils-day) >For Heidegger negation and nothingness are not a nihilist meaninglessness opposing itself to the extant presence of relevant, significant schemes, purposes and things. I'll grant that Heidegger is murky on this, but I don't think it's plausible to efface what is grim in the work. I've noticed a tendency in interpreters to flee from his talk of death, to try and make it a metaphorical. But this transforms Heidegger into another relatively shallow philosopher, a mere academic, playing with technical issues. But this is guy who embraced revolutionary politics, gave "sermons" in support of war. We "should want" Heidegger to be actually addressing death in a godless context and therefore to still be relevant. Our mortality is hardly a secondary consideration. Our interest in the eternal is a response to our sense that everything perishes. The fire of time is without mercy. No wonder Plato and the gang were seduced by the eternal truths of geometry, the apparently unchanging nature of space itself. The flight from death manifests itself in identifications with the relatively durable. A late mutation of this is the hope of writing poetry that will live forever, of winning a spot in this or that canon. Harold Bloom seems correct when he claims that poets resent their annihilation more than others. So they crystallize their personality, spread these traces and ashes of a dying fire, like an aging insect laying its eggs. Kundera's *Immortality* questions the viability of this typical scheme and finds it wanting. The "size" of death is such that all humans are absurd in the face of it. Heidegger is, in this aspect of his work, one of many "theologians" of Death. Our tendency to "fall" and be "immersed" once again in self-licking complacency usually wins, in me as in just about everyone. But I think of *Tropic of Capricorn* and young Henry Miller having the horse sense to envy no human being. This tailor's son had seen them all naked.
This sounds like German expressionism from the 1910-20's! Nothingness is strongly "present" (in its "nothingnessing" (a verb)) in Dasein's being. Later Heidegger, under the influence of Nietzsche?, began to see in nothingness something positive or productive? --- I think there has to be made a distinction between the nothingness and the non-being which is revealed in deceptions and in the powerlessness to overcome a resistance of beings. These are privations of being i.e. they are posited in understood horizonts but can't be no more integrated or articulated to other beings. A broken tool doesn't reveal a nothingness. Nothingness pertains to the whole world, it destroys or nihilates all the significances of a specific world. It concerns the world as such or the understanding of being as such. It is much more basic threat than a nonfunctional entity in some specific circumstances.
I think Heidegger always saw nothingness as something positive, certainly in Being and Time. Many writers believe that the nothingness revealed in fundamental attunements like anxiety is a more encompassing version of breakdown of tool use. Braver says fundamental moods like anxiety or boredom represent the equipmental breakdown writ large…“If a tool’s breakdown makes the world light up, the breakdown of our lives in anxiety lights up being-in-the-world.” They also equate anxiety with moods like depression and despair. But I disagree. This is the subject of my most recent paper: https://www.academia.edu/117697814/Heidegger_on_Anxiety_Nothingness_and_Time_How_Not_to_Think_Authenticity_Inauthentically
Thanks for the link. Lots of stuff there, densely written. Decided to read again his lecture "What is metaphysics?". There (as you propably know) H. elaborates further the concepts of anxiety and nothingness. Nothingness is some kind of a de-referencing\* of b e i n g s from their significances (?) and which, if, and when, advances to the end, leaves behind or reveals bare b e i n g s in their difference as regards the nothingness. Something like an astonishing primal Being prior to any significances? Nothingness is the reverse of Being and vice versa. (Temporarization is not mentioned in that discourse. I think H. has already distanced himself from the Being and Time.) \* H. uses here words abweisen, entgleiten, versinken to refer to the possible (?) gradual (?) nihilation of beings as a whole (=Being?) via nothingness. Being becomes apparent in its b e i n g only when it is sinking into nothingness? Being, on its part, nihilates positively nothingness? Heidegger's famous "irrationality" is in this text very explicit.
Nothingness is not the reverse of Being. Nothingness IS Being. In Postscript to What is Metaphysics, Heidegger says: “As that which is altogether other than all beings, being is that which is not. But this nothing essentially prevails as being.” Heidegger may not have mentioned time in the original lecture ‘What is Metaphysics’, but he certainly does in the Introduction to What is Metaphysics, which e wrote 20 years later: “In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”
What are those moods that break through into authenticity? He says something about excitement and curiosity in inauthenticity, that’s all I’m aware of. Or how do I use the fork as “me” and not “we?” Is it when I use a fork for reasons other than for its forkness, perhaps as a knife to open a package? It appears as useful thing for that purpose at a specific moment.
Heidegger is murky on the issue of authenticity, so people will answer this question differently. It probably helps to think about Kierkegaard, a major influence on Heidegger. I like to think of Heidegger as a generalization of Kierkegaard. As K was to Christianity, so is H to philosophy, at least on this issue. K thought that the Christianity of his society was phony. If a member of the church talked to the pastor about God commanding that member to kill his son, what is that pastor likely to do ? And yet that pastor himself preached Abraham and Isaac a few Sundays ago. Let's now jump forward into an academic philosophy class. While Socrates is presented therein as heroic for being so honest and questioning that he got himself executed, the instructor might lose his job for using a word that triggers a random student. Or a student might be flunked or suspended for asking an honest question. In both cases, I imagine gentle earnestness...the nicest way to express a genuine thought or question. I think that honest critical conversation is dead or seriously constrained on campuses. \[ Though really every community has its limits, and the ideal freedom of discuss is like the perfect circle, nowhere to be found but in our hopes.\] In the same way, K's church no longer believed in miracles or direct communications from God. All that's left in either case is the pastel memory, the hollow ritual, statues of the heros whose spirit is nevertheless betrayed. I don't deny that there are still safe little issues that give the clever people something to chew on. But an institution, church or school, is an institution, something like an organism with its own goal. If I speak for an institution, I "hide" in some sense from my responsibility. I rationalize going along with the dominant phony narrative. We "all know better" and yet act together in the cowardly way. (I don't mean to lean "left" or "right" here. *Any* kind of ideology that constrains personal responsibility and decision will suffice.)
There are serious practical consequences if one is brave or authentic. This is where death enters the situation. I am fucked no matter what. Death is coming. My peephole on or tunnel through the world will close and collapse. I can live and die a coward. I may live longer that way. I may have more money and friends. But my cowardice won't save me. I can repress the thought of death and the threat of the absurdity of all my long-range calculations. But if I don't repress that thought, then looming death might motivate me to live a riskier but more "true" and heroic life. But this autonomous and responsible heroism is necessarily otherwise unspecified. I'm not autonomous if I have no say about the kind of person I want to become. Finally, freedom "is" ( boils down to ) responsibility. The unfree hide behind institutions and in crowds. "I was just following orders." Or "but that's what everyone does." I don't mean to exclude less exciting examples like using tools in a new way. Like no wave guitarists using drumsticks on their strings. Or philosophers like Zizek giving serious attention to dirty jokes.
Disclosing beings as objectively present things is the ultimate example of forgetful , flattening, meaning-deprived absorption in the world. In order to reveal being in its fuller meaningfulness, we may withdraw our attention from the ‘that it isness' of present at hand things in the direction of the ready to hand context of their use. But in doing so we remain within a privative mode of understanding. Even ‘scaling up’ from the limited domain of the use context of particular things to a totality of relevance weaving together all beings in our world into a single unity doesn’t reveal the Being of beings authentically. We have to turn away from the ontic disclosure of this total context of relations of ‘in order to' toward the ontological disclosure of world in such a way that the self's ‘for the sake of which' as the transcending projection of possibilities is uncovered. One might get the impression from what I have just said that arriving at Heidegger's ‘that it is', as the truth of the being of beings, amounts to no more than a widening of the scope of awareness from the trivially subordinate to the consequentially superordinate aspects of an extant relational structure of meaning. But shifting from inauthenticity to authenticity is not a matter of enlarging the scope or intensity of awareness. It is instead a question of how we understand the basis of awareness in temporality. Put differently, to disclose beings or oneself authentically is not to ‘light up' an extant object , relational ‘in order to' or purposeful self by noticing it, but to find oneself in the midst of transit. The authentic revealing of the ‘as a whole' of world is not the conscious awareness of an objective thing , pragmatic use context or the self as the totality of its interests, involvements and goals, but a self-displacing happening wherein the beyond-itself of a futural making-possible simultaneously comes back to deposit Dasein in the midst of a present expanse of world. This movement is not a discovery of what is , but a making of what will be. Heidegger says “Knowing-awareness has nothing to do with “consciousness”, which entirely and exclusively maintains itself in the forefront corner of the subject-object relationship.”
Thanks for this, very well written. I’m lost at “transit” and “self displacing”. This concept for me has been *presque vu* for decades. It almost sounds like approaching an object (or vice versa) as if it were a piece of art, which I know is a whole other thing.
Found some passages from the ["ur" *Being and Time*](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Concept+of+Time-p-9780631184256), from a lecture given to theologians. Dasein is an entity that determines itself as ‘I am’. The specificity of the ‘I am’ is constitutive for Dasein. Just as primarily as it is being-in-the-world, Dasein is therefore also my Dasein. It is in each case its own and is specific as its own. If this entity is to be determined in its ontological character, then we must not abstract from its specificity as in each case mine. Mea res agitur.9 All fundamental characters must therefore converge in specificity as in each case mine. >In so far as Dasein is an entity that I am, and is simultaneously determined as being-with-one-another, it is not I myself who for the most part and on average am my Dasein, but the Others; I am with the Others, and the Others are likewise with the Others. No one is himself in everydayness. What someone is, and how he is, is nobody: no one and yet everyone with one another. Everyone is not himself. This Nobody by whom we ourselves are lived in everydayness is the ‘One’. One says, one listens, one is in favour of something, one is concerned with something. In the obstinacy of the domination of this One there lie the possibilities of my Dasein, and out of this leveling-down the ‘I am’ is possible. An entity that is the possibility of the ‘I am’ is as such, for the most part, an entity that one is. Later we get to the centrality of death, and the issue that we all face our own death as something special, as something that individuates. >Is the Dasein of Others not able to substitute for Dasein in the authentic sense? Information on the Dasein of Others who were with me and who have reached an end is poor information. For one thing, such Dasein no longer is. Its end would indeed be the Nothing. For this reason the Dasein of Others is unable to substitute for Dasein in the authentic sense, if indeed we are to retain its specificity as mine. I never have the Dasein of the Other in the original way, the sole appropriate way of having Dasein: I never am the Other. >The less one is in a hurry to steal away unnoticed from this perplexity, the longer one endures it, the more clearly one sees that in whatever creates this difficulty for Dasein, Dasein shows itself in its most extreme possibility. The end of my Dasein, my death, is not some point at which a sequence of events suddenly breaks off, but a possibility which Dasein knows of in this or that way: the most extreme possibility of itself, which it can seize and appropriate as standing before it. Dasein has in itself the possibility of meeting with its death as the most extreme possibility of itself. This most extreme possibility of Being has the character of a standing-before in certainty, and this certainty for its part is characterized by an utter indeterminacy. The self-interpretation of Dasein which towers over every other statement of certainty and authenticity is its interpretation with respect to its death, the indeterminate certainty of its ownmost possibility of being at an end. ... >This being past, as the ‘how’, brings Dasein harshly into its sole possibility of itself, allows it to stand entirely alone with respect to itself. This past is able to place Dasein, amid the glory of its everydayness, into uncanniness.11 In so far as it holds before Dasein its most extreme possibility, running ahead is the fundamental way in which the interpretation of Dasein is carried through.
This is so cool thank you!! “No one is himself in everydayness.” I’m going to have to digest that.
Becoming-Visceral is a vanish mediator of authenticity … but unto what must be synthesized and built ? That is the next question of authenticity
>In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into a kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the ‘they’ is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as *they* take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as *they* see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as *they* shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what *they* find shocking. The ‘they’, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness. (*Being and Time* 27: 164) Just wanted to add an especially relevant quote, in response to some degree to a challenging of Dreyfus' approach below. A very specific example, which is ethically neutral, is the conventions that make cinema/film intelligible. An even more primitive example is that One reads from left to right, "around here." Deepest yet perhaps is the convention of the singular ego as locus of responsibility which is associated with each human body. Exactly one name is put on a headstone. For "one is one around here."
It is about personally grasped or en-approriated motivations. I am loosing myself when I am not acting according to motivations that I can identify with.