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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#4 « Previous | |Next »
June 28, 2004

Trevor,

If you recall we had some problems about authenticity as a particular mode of life. Let me have another go at trying to make sense of what this could mean for our own mode of life in Australia.

The problem with authenticity had arisen from my argument in some earlier posts that the account of everydayness I gave, (based on Division I of Being and Time) with its tacit knowledge of coping and average public practices that are articulated in ordinary language was the source of the intelligibility of the world and of Dasein. This reworking of Aristotle's techne, (everyday skill and tacit knowledge) provides a way for us to make sense of things in our world.

Heidegger has characterized the first division about everydayness as "preparatory" in the sense of an incompleteness. I then showed that this average everydayness was an inferior form of understanding in Division II. As we have seen the distinction is made in terms of authentic and inauthentic. The average way of acting is to obey standards and rules.

So what is an authentic mode of living?

In that earlier post I quoted William Lange's understanding of authenticity:


"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 said that 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. It was 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 ethical life. This is a reworking of Aristotle's phronesis or practical wisdom, which is associated with an art of living and a knowing your way around the social world.

Herbert Dreyfus says that:


"Given the phenomenology of skill acquisition, it should be clear that the concrete Situation does not have some special metaphysical or private kind of intelligibility cut off from the everyday. Rather, intelligibility for the phronemos is the result of the gradual refinement of responses that grows out of long experience acting within the shared cultural practices."

The concrete desert situation of being bogged in A Japanese Story indicates that the resolute individual makes a judgement about what is appropriate thing to do in that situtation.

In the film the appropriate thing to do for Sandy the Australian geologist, and Hiromitsu, the Japanese businessman, was not to just do what is generally regarded as right:eg., the rule of not leaving the car, or the rule of covering up the body from the sun. Rather it is more what past experience of being in the desert leads us to do in that particular situation: of how to respond in an especially appropriate way to being stranded out of mobile range. This appropriate way involves a special moment of decisive action that involves resoluteness.

Hiromitsu, the Japanese businessman, did this in the morning after the night in the desert when he tossed off his shame and embarrasment and laid down twigs and sticks in the sand to give the wheels some sort of grip. That resoluteness is an example of decisive action.

This decisive action (judgement and conduct) is then retroactively recognized by others as what is appropriate or right.

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:52 PM | | Comments (0)
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