57 pages • 1 hour read
Martin HeideggerBeing And Time
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1927A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Ideal of Authenticity
That Being and Time sets up authenticity as a positive ideal seems to be obvious. The whole work is structured around an exposition of how and why we are initially inauthentic. Then, in Division 2, it becomes centered around how we escape this state. Heidegger spends significant effort revealing and then unpicking the machinations and influence of the they. Even greater effort is then spent in demonstrating, through analysis of being-towards-death and conscience, how this can be resisted. Further, this valuation is reflected in the tone and choice of language. The they is described in terms of oppression, “dominion” (167), “dictatorship” (164), and “falling” (219). Meanwhile, authenticity is identified with understanding and “unshakeable joy” (358). Indeed, one of the core themes of Sein und Zeit is that understanding, and any meaningful philosophy at all, must itself be bound up with the goal of becoming authentic.
There are moments, however, that problematize this view. For example, Heidegger says in the very first pages of Division 1, having introduced the terms “authenticity” and “inauthenticity” as possibilities of Dasein’s being, that “these expressions have been chosen terminologically in a strict sense” (68). Moreover, inauthenticity “does not signify any ‘lower’ degree of Being” (68). He is even more explicit when discussing the concrete form of the they in “idle talk.” As he says, this expression “is not to be used here in a ‘disparaging’ signification,” and its analysis “is far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein” (211).
So, what are we to make of this? On the one hand, the text seems to be a continual and passionate invocation to authenticity and to casting off the shackles of inauthenticity. On the other hand, Heidegger sometimes wants us to believe that his analysis of these categories is strictly descriptive and philosophical. Which position is right? It can perhaps be stated, first, that Heidegger, on pain of incoherence, must maintain that authenticity is a desideratum in some sense. As mentioned, real philosophical understanding, as the text reveals, is necessarily a product of authentic life and thought. To gain true understanding of the world, then, while remaining absorbed in the structures and illusions of the they, is not possible. As such, disengaged description would be insufficient. Thus, even if the goal of Being and Time is purely philosophical, it must also seek and encourage authenticity as a means to that goal.
Furthermore, we might differentiate between an “ethic” and an “ideal” or aim. In the former case, there is a codified and substantive set of rules about, or model for, how one should live one’s life. For example, Christianity or utilitarianism provide such an ethic. In contrast, an ideal is simply anything whatsoever that one might choose to pursue. It might be said then that Heidegger can reject the former but keep the latter. That is, authenticity can be an ideal he wants to promote while not being an “ethical ideal.” His reasons for such a distinction would also be clear. Since authenticity is precisely the pursuit of our own unique way of being, it would conflict with any attempt to prescribe content for it in the form of ethics.
The Limitations of Language and Grammar
The perceived difficulty of Being and Time is in large part due to its use of language. Heidegger apologizes for this difficulty in his Introduction. As he says, “With regard to the awkwardness and ‘inelegance’ of expression in the analyses to come” this is due to the difficulty of attempting to originally grasp entities in their Being. He continues, “For the latter task we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the ‘grammar’” (63). In other words, language as we find it struggles to express the ontology of non-being Heidegger wants to develop. Existing language is saturated in the ontology of presence, with its “heres” and “nows,” and subjects and objects. It quickly pushes any attempt to think or experience outside of these terms back into the currency of common-sense discourse.
Consequently, Heidegger feels obliged to use language in a strange and unnatural-sounding way. This is not just about the new words he uses, or the peculiar inflections he gives to existing ones (for example, “historiology” and “historicality”). It is also, more fundamentally, about grammar, as he points out. Grammatical rules by their very nature seem to confine linguistic expression within a rigid logic of self-identity. Consider, for instance, the effort to construct a sentence about the Dasein that is one’s own standing by a bus stop, next to another Dasein. Invariably, we want to just say, “I am standing at a bus-stop, and there is a man standing near to me.” Doing differently results in some tortuous and hard-to-read sentences. So too with “the they,” and with time. The very expression “the they,” to convey the sense of a being that is everywhere and nowhere, sounds immediately bizarre. With time, it seems even more difficult. The ontology of presence, objectified temporality, and spatial metaphors appear lodged irrevocably in our talk and thinking about this topic. How is one to describe, for instance, an event that did not occur at “any specific moment in time”?
Moreover, even new terminology or manners of expression are susceptible to re-assimilation by the public world of the they. For example, the term “Dasein” has long since ceased to elicit any shock in humanities departments, and the very discourse of authenticity itself has, as Theodor Adorno noted in his Jargon of Authenticity (1964), been co-opted by the advertising industry. As such, the question of language remains one of the most troubling and unresolved issues in Being and Time. It is also one that Heidegger continued to grapple with in works subsequent to this text.
“Becoming Perplexed”: The Negative Role of Philosophy
Philosophy, like the natural sciences, is usually understood “positively.” What this means is that its purpose, fundamentally, is to accumulate “knowledge” regarding, and answers to, certain questions within a delimited field. Of course, being largely non-empirical, such answers might not be as tangible or definitive as those in chemistry or sociology, but the basic existential structure is the same. That is, we move from ignorance of a subject, the absence of knowledge of it, to the possession of positive content, like the blank pages of a book being filled. In contrast, the conception of philosophy in Being and Time seems to refute or highly problematize such a notion.
For the purpose of philosophy, there is, as witnessed in the opening quote, to “become perplexed” (19), and, later, “to be amazed to the point of not understanding” (216). This process has interconnected existential and methodological elements. On one level, it is about reawakening a fascination and awe before the world—something that has become covered over, and invisible, in our everyday absorption in a public world that claims to have understood everything. It is also a point about method, however. The goal of phenomenological philosophy is not so much to provide new answers to old questions; it is, rather, to reconfigure what it means to be asking these questions in the first place. It is for this reason that Heidegger says that Dasein “is itself the clearing” (171). In other words, Dasein, doing philosophy authentically, is a clearing away of hidden and unchallenged assumptions. It is an attempt to clarify, in as radical a way as possible, the nature of the philosophical inquiry being conducted to begin with.
However, this is not a straightforward or obvious task. The very being that is attempting to clarify its inquiry will itself be blind, prior to the inquiry, to a whole host of assumptions and problems concerning it. Thus, Being and Time, and this kind of philosophy more broadly, exhibits a “circular” structure. As seen with Heidegger’s analysis of time, as the inquiry proceeds, new, clearer ways of formulating its task can be exhibited. This will then invite a further return to explore the phenomenon again through this lens, and so on. In this regard, there can be no strict end to the inquiry. Indeed, Heidegger remarks in the last pages of Being and Time that what he has achieved “is still only the point of departure for the ontological problematic” (487). Still, it is a point as radical as almost any in the history of philosophy.
