Trevor ,
I want to go back and pick up this post here on Heidegger on authenticity. If you recall I suggested that authenticity opened up a pathway that explored human finitude, death, nothingness. It is this pathway which has led many observers to associate Heidegger with existentialism.

As I understand it the French existentialists picked up on Heidegger's category of authenticity, interpret this as severing human beings from public life, throwing us back on ourselves as individuals, leaving us alone to create our private meanings and values in a nihilistic world of nothingness. On this interpretation existential is a humanism that presupposes an ontology of the individual subject.

If you recall I argued against it. The argument was directed at the individualist ontology of existentialism in favour of a more communitarian one. Heidegger says that when we’re born, we’re “thrown” into a historical world; we are involuntary recipients of family, culture, and nationality—into which we fall. “Fallen” means that we rest in the “place” where we have landed. We are being-in-the world in that we are concretely engaged in a specific historical situation and we have a particular conception (interpretation) of what it is be in that situation.

We can never be authentic if we remain in the fallen state and just go with the flow of the opinions and conventions of those around us. The background public interpretations of our social practices determine our understanding of being and provide the possibilities of who we are and can become. So we are permeated with publicness, convention, averageness.

Authenticity is a way of interrogating our throwness in every day life, rather than just coping with our daily affairs: it is a form of freedom within a life embedded in a shared world. Connecting authenticity to freedom is where we had got to in the previous posts.

For Heidegger, authentic existence begins from self-understanding. This is not negative freedom (freedom from opinion or convention) since it is tied to care (being concerned about, or taking care) within a world of possibilities that may or may not actualize. Freedom is positive freedom, as it is linked to actuality (or self-actualization) that is realized is resolutedness.

Heidegger argues that authentic life is possible if our being-toward-death is resolutely confronted:

"Once one has grasped the finiteness of one's existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one - those of comfortableness, shirking and taking things lightly - and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate Dasein's primordial historicism which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen."

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