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May 19, 2004
Trevor,
I'm sorry to hear that you've lost interest in Heidegger. I'll keep plugging away on the pathway to Heidegger's concept of authenticity as I find it interesting. This pathway takes us into existentialism.
If you recall, Heidegger understands social life to be anchored in convention that is structured around utility. Authenticity appears to be less an escape from the shared conventions of social life, than an particular response to it. This response is based on an awareness of being thrown into everydayness and being-with others.
William Large puts it this way:
"To be inauthentic is to live for the most part the lives of others, whereas to be authentically is to choose one’s own life in the face of one’s mortality. For the most part, Heidegger would say we live inauthentically, and only in certain key moments is authentic existence a possibility."
I would put it differently. Authenticity as a mode of being involves an acceptance of the social basis of life, a recognition of the social constitution of individuality and a refusal to become lost or aborbed in the dominant modes of coping.
Hence inauthenticity would be a radical individualism or heroic self-sufficiency that denies ethical life (the public constitution of our being), and confuses freedom with solitude. Here we see Heidegger critically pointing the finger at Nietzsche for his radical individualism, which equated freedom with a solitude that denied our worldly contextuality.
And Bataille for that matter.
Thus Heidegger's "authenticity" is not just another version of the modernistic ideal of individual autonomy as some claim. It is a way of interrogating our throwness in every day life rather than just coping with daily affairs; a form of freedom within a life embedded in a shared world.
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