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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger & authenticity « Previous | |Next »
April 13, 2004

Trevor,
well I'm glad that the case of the invisible correspondent has been cleared up. I thought that you were siding with Karl Lowith's interpretation of Heidegger and politics in challenging the autonomy of philosophy; or worse that you were supporting those who took political sides without a knowledge of the texts.

With repect to Heidegger I concur with your statement:


"I don’t think it’s silly to suggest that someone who is looking for completion and on the lookout for the right moment or the messianic event, or whatever, might not think that the Nazis represented just such a moment."

And I concur your judgement here:

"....if Heidegger thought this way, it is not surprising that he might have misread the advent of Nazism as an instance of the sort of event he thinks is crucial."

Heidegger did misread the politicla situation. He said as much. In the Der Spiegel interview, he d sais that the essence of Nazism (in his view, the confrontation between man and technology) was good, but that the German leadership had perverted it. He says:

"A decisive question for me today is: how can a political system accommodate itself to the technological age, and which political system would this be? I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy....... I see the task in thought to consist in general, within the limits allotted to thought, to achieve an adequate relationship to the essence of technology. National Socialism, to be sure, moved in this direction. But those people were far too limited in their thinking to acquire an explicit relationship to what is really happening today and has been underway for three centuries.”

For this conservative reolutionary Nazism, as a political movement, was moving in the right direction. It failed because its leaders did not think radically enough about the essence of technology. In response the Americans in 1945 imposed a half-decade teaching ban on Heidegger.

With that cleared away maybe we can concentrate on the linkages between modern Jewish thought and the history of modern German philosophy in the sense of post-Nietzschean religious sensibility that is condensed into the paradox of a "redemption-in-the-world" that can be connected to Heidgger's category of authenticity.

Let me briefly indicate this authenticity as it is developed in Being and Time by slightly rephrasing this interpretation. Being-in-the-world for Heidegger is the public world of social norms, conducts and rituals. This "publicness," this "being-with-one-another, involves our "thrownness" into the conventions and "groupthink" of society. So we come to exist not on our own terms but on those of what Heidegger calls das Man---the "they" whose beliefs and behaviors make up the "average everydayness" of human existence. Most of us prefer and thus naturally "fall" into this tempered mode of existence, are happy not to think for ourselves but to follow instead the routines and fashions of those around us.

Salvation --to use a theological term---consists in the fundamental realization that "truth" exists not in the people and institutions among which we are thrown, but is in us as beings who question and think the nature of Being. Authenticity appears at this point since the questioning and thinking must be an authentic expression of human beings in their freedom from das Man.

In contrast, inauthenticity means being at home in the world of publicness-the world of rules, rituals, and conventions that disburdens existence of its personal responsibility for choice. How then must we act to recover the authentic existence we have lost by living in the conventional public world of the other?

The salvation is a standard philsoophical one. We turn from living by the conventional rules and habits and project a world of particular significance to ourselves. We insist upon our right to be creative and free in our questioning and articulating of Being, creating worlds of meaning around those things that are, and through modifying the world into which we find we have been thrown.

So we have a "theological" discourse with the categories of fallenness and authenticity, on being-towards-death and freedom, a post-theological discourse following on modernity's eclipse of God (ie., Nietzsche) that involves a reworking of a theological legacy. And that is not suprising since Heidegger was a Catholic prior to Being and Time.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:17 AM | | Comments (3)
Comments

Comments

"In response the Americans in 1945 imposed a half-decade teaching ban on Heidegger."

1) I believe the French were responsible for that part of Germany, not the USA.

2) The ban was imposed by the university's de-nazification committee, although the French authorities were probably a powerful influence.

Pete,
Thanks for that. My history of that period is very slap dash.

Jaspers!