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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'

On Authenticity « Previous | |Next »
May 21, 2004

Gary,

Forget what I said yesterday. We all have to learn to live with our depression. It’s a depressing world. People are being slaughtered all over the place and maybe we’re just waiting for our turn.

Okay, I’ll talk about Heidegger if I have to.

All the same, I don’t think you are willing to look at Heidegger critically. You just want to delve into him and run with some idea – such as you did on last Wednesday (19 May) with the concept of authenticity, which is a response to ‘an awareness of being thrown into everydayness and being-with others’. Later you describe it as ‘a refusal to become lost or absorbed in the dominant modes of coping’.

This is then used denigrate certain ways of living as inauthentic, although there is such a bigger qualifier riding on the claim that if anyone is upset by it you can excuse them as ‘not denying ethical life’, or not denying ‘the public constitution of our being’, or not confusing ‘freedom with solitude’. The problem with all this is that there is no way of telling whether or not any of these hold in the majority of cases. In fact, it is not even clear exactly what they mean.

Let’s put the qualifier aside. The what you are saying is that ‘radical individualism’ and living in solitude are inauthentic, while being out there and mixing in some way is authentic. Well, that’s a bit rich. If the former means thinking only of yourself you are probably right. Living in solitude, however, depends on historical circumstances and I wouldn’t condemn anyone doing it as getting it all wrong, of not paying sufficient attention to their eventual death, and so on. The way they are living might be the right way to live. Do you think it was authentic to be out there mixing with the Nazis. That meets all your criteria. In such circumstances, withdrawing seems to be the morally superior action.

I hesitate to accuse you of just trying to justify your own lifestyle, but at the end of your philosophical training you chose to go off and do something else. Fair enough. I’m not about to judge you. It was your choice. I chose differently and I have ended up in a room on my own. The problems I discussed in my last entries are a consequence of trying to get out there and mix it socially, but at the present solitary confinement seems to be my lot. You chose to stop being a philosopher and chose to continue to be one. At that choice it’s been pretty much out of our hands. Being a philosopher means spending a lot of time alone, reading and rereading, thinking and rethinking, going back, starting again. Studying is different from reading. I’ve worked on Adorno for twenty years now and I feel like I’m just starting. It’s the name of the game.

Our two personal choices show up in the way we approach Heidegger. You read him like a non-philosopher. He’s got something that might help you in your quest and you don’t care about the critical issues. Okay. fair enough. But that’s not doing philosophy. I know, you are doing something else, working in the political sphere, mixing it in Canberra, et cetera.

Having said all this, I reckon you’d benefit from reading Adorno, particularly The Jargon Of Authenticity. Why do you write in such a strange way as this: ‘an awareness of being thrown into everydayness and being-with others’. That’s not an ordinary everyday mode of expression. Few reading this will have any idea of what ‘being thrown into everydayness’ really means – ditto for ‘being-with’. Why speak in a way that people don’t quite understand? This is very Heideggeresque, very jargonistic. It’s like the religious person who always wants to slip Christ or other religious ideas and perspectives into a sentence in some way. It is like religious language in that it too needs to break with the everyday in order to establish its legitimacy.

There’s an epistemological problem with authenticity – there’s no way of ever knowing when you are living authentically. Take Heidegger’s etymological investigations – from what I’ve read, by and large, they are a load of crap, but he probably didn’t think so as he wrote them. He probably thought he was being authentic. When I look back at things I wrote years ago much of it is not just bad but seems to have an element of falseness to it, of pretentiousness, of being mannered in some way. When I wrote it I thought I was getting down and dirty but in retrospect I was just preening myself. What does this tell me? That perhaps the individual’s present is always authentic in relation to its past.

If it helps you with your political work then it’s all well and good, but as philosophy this stuff by Heidegger is just reaction, remythologisation – turning philosophical stories back into myths when the process should more than ever remain focused on getting rid of myth. It’s all right to be critical of rationalisation but replacing it with myth is no solution. This point marks the crucial difference between Heidegger and Adorno. More than ever, philosophy must remain philosophical.

| Posted by at 12:56 PM | | Comments (0)
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