A Discussion of Heidegger's Concept of Mood
Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity
Was Heidegger Dishonest?
In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger introduced his description of human beings--whom he called "Dasein"--with a misleading explanation. First he states that persons exist in two modes of Being: "inauthentic" and "authentic."{1} He denies that inauthentic being is less or lower than authentic being.{2} Then, five pages later, he states that the Christian concept of human being is one of the major obstacles to true understanding of human being, which he presents in his book. Heidegger wrote:
"But what stands in the way of the basic question of Dasein's Being (or leads it off the track) is an orientation thoroughly coloured by the anthropology of Christianity and the ancient world, whose inadequate ontological foundations have been overlooked both by the philosophy of life and by personalism."{3}
From this introduction to his argument, we would naturally infer that Heidegger intended to present a secular, humanistic theory of human being. The basic distinction between inauthentic and authentic modes of being would be an alternative understanding of human beings, opposed to Christian concepts of human nature. Whatever Heidegger's conscious intent, his basic distinction is not an alternative to and does not oppose Christian views of human beings (except in the sense that his view is not religious). To the contrary, the basic distinction between inauthentic and authentic is a disguised re-presentation of the basic distinction in Christian ontology between Being without Faith and Being with Faith.{4}
Inauthentic Being is distinguished, Heidegger wrote, by "averageness" or "everydayness." An inauthentic Being falls through life. She does not stand for herself or anything else. She is oriented outside herself. Her concerns reflect the concerns of other persons. She is unable to decide for herself. She is not living her life for herself. She lives in time, understanding that she has a past and a future (she might be inauthentic, but she is a human being, after all, not an animal); but she repeats history uncritically and fails to confront the limited time she has available to do anything with her life. Simply put, she does not own her life or its possibilities.{5}
In contrast, the authentic Being lives her life for herself. She is resolute. She is committed to herself. She is oriented within herself--she has an inner life. She distinguishes between her own cares and the concerns of others. She challenges the patterns of the past. She is keenly aware that she will die one day. She has confronted her anxieties about her future and is determined to accomplish something with her life before her death. In a word, she owns her own life and its possibilities.{6}
We can illustrate the genealogy of the inauthenticity/authenticity distinction in the Christian concept of Faith. We will look at Kierkegaard's employment of the distinction, of interest in Heidegger's own day, and Paul's formulation of the distinction, which inspired Luther, whose writing Heidegger studied carefully.{7}
Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard was concerned with the question of how to actualize the Christian life through Faith. Presented with Christian question--Do you want to be saved for eternal life and happiness?--persons fall by their responses into two categories: the "essentially existing individual" and the "romantically wishful individual."{8} For the essentially existing individual, the desire for salvation transforms his life. For the romantically wishful individual, desire for salvation is merely wishfulness for which the person is unwilling to give anything up. The essentially existing individual who is "resolved" gives up everything of immediacy in his life for his goal. His life is his relationship with the goal of eternity.{9}
Kierkegaard pounds the inauthentic/authentic distinction as between living outwardly and living inwardly like wooden pegs in doctrinal joinery. Several quotations make the point well.
"Aesthetic pathos keeps itself at a distance from existence, or is in existence in a state of illusion; while existential pathos dedicates itself more and more profoundly to the task of existing, and with the consciousness of what existence is, penetrates all illusions, becoming more and more concrete through reconstructing existence in action."{10}
And:
"Action outwardly directed may indeed transform existence (as when an emperor conquers the world and enslaves the peoples), but not the individual's own existence; and action outwardly directed may transform the individual's own existence (as when from having been a lieutenant he becomes an emperor, or from street peddler becomes a millionaire, or whatever else of the sort may fall to his lot), but not the individual's inner existence."{11}
Finally, the point:
"But essential existential pathos is essentially related to existence; and to exist essentially is inwardness ..." {12}
Let us look at Heidegger's notion that the inauthentic person cannot freely choose her fate; whereas the authentic person is free and in charge of her destiny. Kierkegaard made this distinction in Concept of Anxiety in distinguishing the spiritless person and the person with spirit, as between the pagan and the Christian.
"The lostness of spiritualness, as well as its security, consists in its understanding nothing spiritually and comprehending nothing as a task, even if it is able to fumble after everything with its limp clamminess."{13}
"...in fate the anxiety of the pagan has its object, its nothing. He cannot come into a relation to fate, because in the one moment it is the necessary and in the next it is the accident."{14}
Further, the person in sin experiences "the contentless, the boring"{15}, lives a life of anxiety, and contrives "a hundred evasions."{16}
By contrast, the person with Faith has "certitude"{17}, "inwardness"{18}, and "earnestness"{19}.
Paul and the New Testament
In Romans, Paul explained the principles of Christian Faith to the young Christian community of Rome to try to settle doctrinal issues. He distinguished being unsaved and saved as qualitatively different states of being. The unsaved could not obtain salvation through obedience to laws of Judaism, or circumcision, or good works. Only the intercession of God's grace, obtained through Faith in Jesus Christ, brought salvation.
Paul naturally contrasted as vividly as possible the state of sin and state of grace. Sin was characterized by "all manner of wickedness," such as "envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity".{20} Being saved produced endurance, character, hope, love, sincerity, and conscience.{21} The state of grace was not simply psychologically different from the state of sin; it was ontologically distinct. The person saved in Faith was a new kind of Being. Grace was underived and irreducible. She in Faith was truly righteous of God.
Hebrews describes the true Christian Faith in terms echoed in Heidegger's description of authenticity. Christians with "a true heart in full assurance of faith" can "hold fast" "without wavering" in their faith. They motivate other persons to love and to do good deeds. They encourage each other.{22}
They are, in other words, "authentic". They are inner-directed persons who challenge the past (the Judaic and Greek heritages), have confronted their inevitable deaths, are confident and unwavering (they are not "falling," to use Heidegger's word) in what they must accomplish with their lives before their deaths, and can resist the outward world.
Testing the Inner Life
Resisting the outward world was not mere philosophical speculation for armchair Christians. Persecution put the Faith to the test. From the Christian point of view, the well-known imagery of "The Revelation to John" portrayed the personal, religious, and historical significance of early religious trials.{23}
Pliny the Younger described the trial of faith from the Roman point of view in a letter (ca. 112 A. D.) to the emperor Trajan. Pliny, legate propaetor of Bithynia, a province now in Turkey, desired to extend judicial formality over the trial of Christian heresy. Here is the real test of living the outward life versus commitment to the inner life.
(Pliny to Trajan)
"... I have followed this procedure in the case of those who have been brought before me as Christians. I asked them whether they were Christians. If they confessed I repeated the question a second and a third time with threats of punishment; those who were obstinate I ordered to be executed. For I did not doubt that, whatever it was that they confessed, their stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy ought certainly to be punished. There were others of similar madness, who, because they were Roman citizens, I have noted for sending to the city. Soon, the crime spreading, as is usual, because of this treatment, more cases arose. An anonymous accusation containing many names was presented. Those who denied that they were or had been Christians ought, I thought, to be dismissed, since they repeated after me an invocation to the gods and made supplication with incense and wine your image, which I had ordered to be brought for the purpose together with the statues of the gods, and since besides they reviled Christ, not one of which things, they, say, those who are really Christians can be compelled to do. Others accused by the informer said that they were Christians and then denied it; in fact they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, some many years before, several even twenty. All of these both worshiped your image and the statues of the gods and reviled Christ. They continued to maintain that this was the amount of their fault or error, that on a fixed day they were accustomed to come together before daylight and to sing by turns a hymn to Christ as a god, and that they bound themselves by oath, not for some crime, but that they would not commit theft, robbery, or adultery, that they would not betray a trust, nor deny a deposit when called upon. After this it was their custom to disperse and to come together again to partake of food, of an ordinary and harmless variety, however. Even this they ceased to do after the publication of my edit in which, according to your command, I had forbidden associations. Hence I believed it the more necessary even to put to torture two female slaves, who were called deaconesses, in order to find out what was true. I found nothing but a vicious, extravagant superstition."{24}
The honest heroism of the early Christian testimony to genuine Faith stands in stark contrast to Heidegger's dissembling verbalisms of inauthenticity and authenticity. Heidegger might have had a hidden intent to build an ontological foundation for Christian theology, but Christianity did not need it. And not Christianity or twentieth century humanism or twentieth century political anthropology or politics needed the services of dishonest philosophy.{25}
Notes
1. See article 2 for a discussion of authenticity and inauthenticity.
2. Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 68 {H. 42-43}.
3. Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 74-75 {H. 48-49}.
4. On Heidegger's lapse from Catholicism, see Safranski, Martin Heidegger, pp. 107-112. Lapsed, perhaps, but not freed from religious concerns. Kisiel quotes from a long letter in 1927, after publication of Being and Time, in which Heidegger states: "My work has no ambitions toward a worldview or a theology, but it may well contain approaches and intentions in the direction of an ontological founding of Christian theology as a science." This intent was not obvious in the text. Kisiel, The Genesis, p. 452.
5. The following sections have been especially important in drawing this composite portrait of inauthenticity. Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 68-69 {H. 42-43}, pp. 163-168 {H. 126-130}, pp. 168-224 (sections 28-38) {130-180}, pp. 219-224 {H. 175-180}, pp. 292-260 {H.248-260}, pp. 370-380 {H. 323-332}, pp. 384-402 (section 68) {H. 335-350}.
6. The following sections have been especially important in drawing this composite portrait of authenticity. Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 68-69 {H. 42-43}, pp. 304-325 {H. 260-280}, pp. 352-358 {305-311}, pp. 370-380 {H. 323-332}, pp. 385-396 {336-346}, pp. 434-449 {H. 382-397}.
7. Husserl characterized Heidegger as "an 'undogmatic Protestant and free Christian' ". Quoted by Kisiel, The Genesis, p. 73. On Heidegger's study of Luther, see Kisiel, The Genesis, pp. 76-78. Heidegger consciously resisted the philosophy of Kierkegaard, which was fashionable in Germany in the 1920s; but he was influenced by it nonetheless. See the immediately preceding references from Kisiel, The Genesis, and also p. 150. On Heidegger's reluctance to fall under Kierkegaard's spell, see, Kisiel, The Genesis, pp. 275, 316.
8. Kierkegaard, Concluding, p. 351.
9. Kierkegaard, Concluding, pp. 351-354, passim.
10. Kierkegaard, Concluding, p. 387.
11. Kierkegaard, Concluding, p. 387.
12. Kierkegaard, Concluding, p. 388.
13. Kierkegaard, Anxiety, p. 95.
14. Kierkegaard, Anxiety, p. 97.
15. Kierkegaard, Anxiety, p. 132
16. Kierkegaard, Anxiety, p. 154.
17. Kierkegaard, Anxiety, p. 146
18. Kierkegaard, Anxiety, p. 146.
19. Kierkegaard, Anxiety, p. 148-149.
20. Paul, Romans, 1:29-31, New Oxford Annotated Bible.
21. Paul, Romans, 5:1-5, Paul, 1 Corinthians, 13:4-13, Paul, 1 Timothy, 1:5-7, New Oxford Annotated Bible.
22. Hebrews, 10:22-25, New Oxford Annotated Bible.
23. The bloody robes and tortured and beheaded bodies of the persecuted Christians were to be revenged by horrendous suffering inflicted upon the unsaved during the three woes and the final wrath of God.
24. "Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan," English translation from the Latin by Leon Hardy Canfield. Leon Hardy Canfield, The Early Persecutions of the Christians. Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Edited by the Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University, Volume LV, Number 136. New York: Columbia University, 1913. Pp. 183-184.
25. I have found to be helpful Ferrara's summaries of recent professional philosophy's discussion of authenticity. Alessandro Ferrara, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the project of modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. See esp. chapter 1, "Authenticity and validity" and chapter 8, "Rethinking the project of modernity."
Adorno famously expressed the Marxists' annoyance with Heidegger and existentialism in general; see Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity [Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie (1964)], translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
Adorno's annoyance should be put in the context of Marxists' own dishonest debasement of language in the twentieth century. Though Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School, still respected by mainstream Western academics, his fellow Marxists, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, and communist sympathizers, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, had, by the time of Adorno's book, completely barbarized language and logic in the name of the triumph of working class collective justice and totalitarianism. (For Merleau-Ponty, see my article, "Terrorism and Humanism".
References
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. [Sein und Zeit, 1927; Seventh edition, Neomarius Verlag, Tübingen.] Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962. The original pagination in the German edition is cited in curly braces, e.g., "H." standing for Heidegger, {H. 15}.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. [Sein und Zeit, 1927; originally published by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen.] Translated by Joan Stambaugh. [Albany, N.Y.] State University of New York, 1996. The original pagination in the German edition is cited in curly braces, e.g., "H." standing for Heidegger, {H. 15}.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson. Completed after his death and provided with Introduction and Notes by Walter Lowrie. First edition 1941. Reprint edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Edited and Translated with Introduction and Notes by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Kierkegard's Writings VIII. Reprint. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Safranski, Rüdiger. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Translated by Ewald Osers. First published as Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit, 1994. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apcrocrypha. Revised Standard Version. Edited by Herbert G. May and Gruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Contents
You show a surprising (although unfortunately too common) tendency to either not understand what you read, or to have only read commentators on things rather than going to the sources themselves. Over and over again Heidegger makes clear in Being and Time that authenticity is a temporary modification of inauthenticity, human beings' natural state. In inauthenticity, then, a human being is concerned with things within-the-world, not in an authentic individualized way, but in a common, average way. This is not a problem to be done away with by a better way of living, or a leap of faith, or any other means at our disposal, it is simply the way things are. We can experience the world individually, authentically, for short periods of time, when something makes us come back to ourselves, or "find ourselves" in popular parlance, from out of our lostness in the world - where else could we be lost? Heidegger makes no claim that there is anything outside or beyond the world, his philosophy, such as it is, is entirely secular. That it provides for xtianity, islam, wicca, scientism, etc. as possibilities for human beings would seem to me an advantage over philosophies that do not, because xtians, muslims, wiccans, scientismists etc. do in point of fact exist in the world.
Posted by: Andrew Glynn | August 03, 2007 at 11:28 PM