Abstract
The authors provide an analysis of Heidegger’s critique of the narrowness of the modern worldview, and the modern self in particular, in an attempt to understand what the meaning of human existence is for Heidegger. Heidegger criticizes the prevalent view of the self as divorced from the world and from others, showing that the nature of human being involves immersion in the world as a fundamentally social entity. While commentators on Heidegger often juxtapose the early Heidegger with the later Heidegger, the authors show a cord of resonance with the early Heideggerian concept of authenticity [Eigentlichkeit] and the later Heideggerian notion of dwelling [wohnen], thereby providing a coherent interpretation of authenticity in Heidegger’s thought by focusing on the structural similarities between the two. The authors argue in the end that Heidegger’s notion of dwelling among things of significance provides a contemporary version of what it means to “know thyself” today.
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Notes
- 1.
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott note that ὑποκείμενον comes from ὑπόκειμαι, which means “to lie under or beneath” (2003, 843).
- 2.
Those interested in the relation between Descartes and medieval philosophy should consult Roger Ariew’s Descartes among the Scholastics (2011).
- 3.
For a more thorough discussion of this topic, see Guignon 1983, Chap. 1.
- 4.
As Heidegger states, “Now the more unequivocally one maintains that knowing is proximally and really ‘inside’ […], the less one presupposes when one believes that one is making headway in the question of the essence of knowledge and in the clarification of the relationship between subject and Object. For only then can the problem arise of how this knowing subject comes out of its inner ‘sphere’ into one which is ‘other and external’, of how knowing can have any object at all, and of how one must think of the object itself so that eventually the subject knows it without needing to venture a leap into another sphere” (BT, 87/SZ, 60).
- 5.
Macquarrie and Robinson capitalize their translation of “Sein” and its derivatives (e.g. “in-der-Welt-sein”); we render all such instances with the lower-case.
- 6.
We should point out that the word “Others” has a technical meaning for Heidegger. “Others” does not mean everyone but myself; rather, “they are…those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too” (BT, 154/SZ, 118). In other words, there is no fundamental separation between Others and myself for Heidegger.
- 7.
In section 64 of Being and Time, Heidegger makes continual reference to the “I” and appears to be carrying out an analysis of the first-person (BT, 364-70/SZ, 316–323). We must not take too much from this for the following reasons. For one, most of the discussion involves an interpretation of Kant, and Heidegger is making use of Kant’s terminology. Indeed, this is indicated by his repeated use of scare quotes when referencing the “I.” Some of Heidegger’s closing remarks also make it clear that the question of the “I” will not be central to his inquiry, but is in fact posterior and dependent upon a more primordial understanding of the self: “As something that keeps silent, authentic being-one’s-Self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying ‘I’; but in its reticence it ‘is’ that thrown entity as which it can authentically be. The Self which the reticence of resolute existence unveils is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question as to the being of the ‘I’. […] In the prevalent way of saying ‘I’, it is constantly suggested that what we have in advance is a Self-Thing, persistently present-at-hand; the ontological question of the being of the Self must turn away from any such suggestion” (BT, 369-70/SZ, 322–323). For these reasons, there is scarcely another mention of the “I” in the rest of Being and Time.
- 8.
“Dasein is falling into the ‘they’ (in being-already-amidst the world of its concern), and it is summoned out of this falling by the appeal” (BT, 322/SZ, 277, translation modified).
- 9.
“Dasein’s absorption in the ‘they’ and its absorption in the ‘world’ of its concern, make manifest something like a fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself – of itself as an authentic potentiality-for-being-its-Self” (BT, 229/SZ, 184).
- 10.
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Burgess, S., Rentmeester, C. (2015). Knowing Thyself in a Contemporary Context: A Fresh Look at Heideggerian Authenticity. In: Pedersen, H., Altman, M. (eds) Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 74. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9442-8_3
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