Being and Time
Existentialism
We come now to the second main theme or idea-set in Being and Time. Heidegger claims to find a deeper level to our intending and meaning, by broadening his analysis beyond its early focus, in most of Division I, on our everyday or usual condition. When we examine certain exceptional conditions we can be in, we discover a structure deeper than we noticed in the pragmatic account. (That there is this deeper level is another reason Heidegger is not a “pragmatist.”) But in order to achieve this deeper truth about ourselves we need to change once again the kind of understanding we pursue/ expect—and so change too our method (for reaching that truth). We must adapt phenomenology still further from Husserl, to study the “existential” structure of our intentionality.
This second theme or analysis is less to the foreground in Division I, although it is anticipated in a few places: in Chapter 4 on das Man, in Chapter 5 on falling, and in Chapter 6 on anxiety. More subtly, the groundwork is laid for this analysis right at the beginning of Division I, where Heidegger introduces Jemeinigkeit or “mineness.” As we’ll see, this is the central element in the existential theme, and he needs to build it in from the start. But these various pieces aren’t put together into a coherent story until Division II; its first three chapters are the main statement of the second analysis.1
Now, as I did with “pragmatic,” I will use “existential” in a non-Heideggerian way. For Heidegger, we’ve seen (in Chapter 4.3), “existential” picks out especially the projective aspect of our intending—the way we are towards possibilities. I will use it in a sense more common today, for a recognizable cluster of claims about “the human condition” that are distinctive of the so-called existentialists. Heidegger takes over many of these claims from Kierkegaard—as he may not sufficiently acknowledge.2 But he brings these claims into a compelling, even canonical form, in which they were then taken over by the French existentialists and many others.
This second analysis in Being and Time introduces what is mostly lacking in the pragmatism: something like values.3 The principal notion in this existentialism is authenticity, which stands out in the book as the ideal it most offers its readers—how, it suggests, a person should wish and try to be. Heidegger himself denies that his notion proposes a value, and we will need to take full account of his reasons. But I think we can and should still say that he “values” authenticity, if we build those reasons into how we hear that term. Being and Time surely offers us values, despite his demurrals: that he is “against” das Man and falling, and “for” authenticity and resoluteness (towards death) is inescapable despite his denials of any value-judgments in them.
I will try to give a sense of this principal value, and of its metaethical status for Heidegger. On what basis does he offer it to us? Does he claim it is discovered by phenomenological study of human intending? Phenomenology will, of course, discover any and all of our values as it studies our intending: our valuing is a way we intend. But how can phenomenology commend any of these values in preference to any others? Wouldn’t that go illegitimately beyond the method’s task to understand intending?
We should also ask some normative questions about the book’s values. Isn’t this ideal of authenticity too self-centered? Mightn’t it be consistent with many or all kinds of mistreatment of others? It is remarkable how little attention Heidegger gives to the authentic individual’s actions towards (or feelings about) others. And this seems reflected in the structure of the concept. Not only is authenticity a condition of me, but it’s the condition in which I most achieve my mineness, and most am/have a self. We’ll ask whether this self-accomplishment requires or encourages any particular relation towards other people. (Many worry that it is ethically neutral, or worse.)
Now in what sense are these existential findings “deeper” than the pragmatic? When Heidegger leads up to these findings, at the beginning of Division II, he describes the inquiry not as going deeper, but as getting wider: we’re bringing “more” of Dasein’s intentionality into our view, to grasp it more nearly “complete.” Division I had focused on our average everydayness, and now we bring in various special conditions. The studies of both death (Chapter 1) and authenticity (Chapters 2) are explicitly undertaken for the sake of this completeness.
But it turns out that this wider view reveals not just further parts (or aspects or conditions) of Dasein that get added alongside everydayness, but an overall structure that the pragmatic findings must then be reinterpreted within. This overall structure is of course likewise intentional, and in Heidegger’s strongly telic sense: it is still a matter of being directed, but in a different way and towards a different end. And this existential directedness is “deeper” than the pragmatic, because it motivates the latter. It is our stance towards our existential end that explains the manner in which we adopt and pursue our pragmatic ones.
Our everyday aims are bound up in capacities—and this is true for that structural, existential end as well. It is the object of a certain Seinkönnen, an ability-to-be, which encompasses a certain ability to do. This special Seinkönnen is a meta-capacity, since it’s an ability to operate in a certain way upon our other, first-order capacities, including all of those discussed in Chapter 4. To put it quickly, authenticity is the exercise of a capacity to “choose” our other projects in a certain way. But we ordinarily fail to exercise it; we even avoid doing so, because it is our hardest work.
Heidegger thinks that this meta-capacity is essential to us, and in such a way that we have it as our most important task to be/ do. How I most ought to be is authentic—understood as the adequate exercise of this capacity. Success within the terms of my particular (existentiell) projects is much less important than the way I exercise that essential (existential) capacity, which is a way of choosing and pursuing those projects. It’s because this capacity is so basic that Heidegger sometimes says that authenticity is “more originary” [ursprünglicher] than everydayness. Authenticity enacts an aiming to which we’re committed before all our particular ends.
Heidegger most distinctly conveys the decisive importance of authenticity by saying that it is what first gives us a self. The capacity, that is, is a capacity to become a self, to make oneself a self. Choosing in the right way just is to be/have a self. And doing so accomplishes our essential mineness, which he sets into Dasein from the book’s beginning. This special notion of self is near the heart of Heidegger’s existential ideal—and is what most makes it “existential.” The notion is so important that we should spend some time on it now.
Heidegger has an unusual but not unprecedented idea of “self.” I will try to carry us there by steps from a more familiar notion. Given that each of us is a Dasein, as analyzed so far, how should we speak of the “self” of this entity?
1. A first thing we might use “self” to refer to is simply this entity as entity—the entity “itself.” In this sense every entity is a self, including everything in the great non-Dasein mass of things. When “self” occurs in compound personal pronouns such as “itself,” we might say it carries this minimal sense.
2. A second thing “self” could refer to is not the entity but a part or aspect that is essential or definitive in it. So we might think of a person’s “true self” as some core or privileged part, perhaps a dominant part. So here “self” is used as a kind of honorific, for a part within the constitution of an entity. Again this might apply to any entity.
3. However, neither of these senses is in the right ballpark for Heidegger, since neither of them makes the self a matter of intentionality. Only something that means, that has a “there”—a Dasein—can be a self. And this is a third thing “self” might plausibly refer to: an intender or meaner, a Dasein. It’s in this sense that I might refer to my different impulses or personae as selves within me—I’m thinking of them as micro-intenders.
4. But this is still missing something crucial: to be a self, the intentionality must also have that reflexive turn upon itself, which Heidegger calls mineness (see Chapter 3.1). What makes a self is not intending per se, but an intending that intends reflexively, i.e. intends itself. It is this reflex in intentionality that Heidegger calls Jemeinigkeit—the basis he lays at the start for selfhood and authenticity. This mineness, remember, gets cashed out later in the way all three aspects of being-in—my stances towards the world in projection, feeling, and talk—involve this reflexivity. In projection, I aim at the end as a better condition of myself the aimer; in self-finding I feel myself to be the feeler thrown; and in Rede I identify myself as a talker within the group or practice. So sense 4 is an important part of Heidegger’s account of the self.
5. However even this mineness isn’t enough to make me a self in Heidegger’s full sense. Every Dasein has mineness, but not every Dasein is a self; to be a self I need to carry out or accomplish that mineness in a special way. For it turns out that this reflexive turn is usually corrupted or ruined in the everyday way we all live. This happens because there is something hard or painful about fully or straightforwardly intending oneself, and we embrace that everyday stance precisely to avoid this. So my everyday ways of grasping, feeling, and wording fail at “mineness.” To be a self I must overcome this drift towards concealing myself from myself. I must intend myself as I am, in truth. This achievement is of course authenticity—being one’s own, being a self.
Our main challenge will be to describe this achievement, since it is Being and Time’s principal ideal. The book arrives at this ideal following that methodological strategy of pursuing Dasein’s “completeness” and “unity.” I will introduce this route it takes to authenticity where it is relevant, but I think a different way of organizing the existential ideas will help.
For there is, behind that explicit argument, a story that we are all roughly familiar with, shared by existentialists generally. This is a story in a strong sense, a human drama, simple as the main elements of it are.4 It is a drama of illness, diagnosis, and cure—a drama with a single role, into which the reader is invited to step, in imagination and aspiration. Heidegger sets this drama vividly before us, even though it’s not reflected in the overt structure of his book. I will try to tell it in this chapter.
Now of course the illness here involved is not physical, but in our intending. The diagnosis will identify how this intending has gone wrong; it will attribute certain “motives” to Dasein for so going wrong. All of this will pose questions for us. How can phenomenology deliver such analyses and explanations? How does it discover what our motives really are—does it somehow introspect their operation? And how, above all, can phenomenology deliver the values this story involves: the negative value of the illness, the positive value of the cure?
A point to bear in mind in the following is that this web of ideas will be one of the main casualties of Heidegger’s turning. He for the most part abandons these existential claims and ideals—though of course there are remnants. But the center drops out of this value when Heidegger diagnoses authenticity as expressive of technology, and turns against its fixation on the self.
In the simple drama of existentialism, the beginning is a picture of the egregiously unsatisfactory condition we’re all alleged to be in. Heidegger’s main term for this condition is “falling”; another, more negative, is “inauthenticity.” With them he raises a complaint against how we all live, a complaint he means to be vivid and provoking enough to make us feel the need for his way out. “Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness” [BT g178]; it thereby “has lost itself, and, in falling, ‘lives’ away from itself” [g179].
Here we meet Heidegger in the characteristic existentialist stance (or persona) of a prophet denouncing the outrageous error widespread or universal in society—error that involves a spiritual or moral failure. The term “falling” itself works this way, with its echo of the Biblical fall. This prophetic stance tends to annoy or thrill his readers, according to taste.
Of course it’s a consequence of many or even most philosophers’ views that most people fail to live as they should, that they’re misguided and require the correction of a new and better theory—which the philosopher can provide. But existentialists express this with noticeably greater urgency and even alarm—stressing just how dire and misguided the usual way of life is.
Now it’s natural for the prophetic stance to treat our problem as importantly epistemic: we’re failing or refusing to know or recognize something. In religious authors this is God of course: spiritual depravity is a consequence of our turning our backs on God. For Heidegger, by contrast, we all flee and avoid facing something about ourselves, as Dasein. He puts great weight on this epistemic failure; it may be his main ground of complaint against falling and inauthenticity. Authenticity corrects this error, and gives truth, and indeed the very truth that phenomenology pursues.
There’s a second stance or role that existentialists typically adopt in their critique of us all: that of psychological or social physician. They depict the pervasive failing as not just spiritual or moral error, but a kind of illness, which is subject to diagnosis and cure. They base their negative assessment on a failure in the natural or proper functioning of the person or self—given some account of the structure of this self. So the problem is not (just) epistemic, but (as I’ll put it) functional: it depends on diagnosing ways our intentionality is malfunctioning.
Heidegger does not explicitly appeal to this medical model, and there’s a way it may seem not apt for him: health, we feel, should be normal, and illness a breakdown and exception, yet he insists that falling is Dasein’s usual condition. Nevertheless I think he leans on an abstract cousin of this functional argument. For he tries, with his “existential analysis,” to map the essential structure of our intentionality, and to show that falling is a failure or breakdown in a key or deepest part of that structure—so that it’s still a kind of malfunctioning, even if it’s nearly universal.5
Values come into Heidegger’s phenomenology by both these epistemic and functional routes, hence express those personae of prophet and physician. I’ll show how his critical assessments of falling and das Man—his aspersions against the way we all live—are rooted in these two points. His ultimate complaints against falling are that it lacks truth, and that it’s dysfunctional; he promotes authenticity on the ground that it corrects both faults.
But before we examine these complaints more closely, I must address a problem raised earlier: Heidegger says explicitly that these notions (falling, authenticity, das Man, etc.) are not valuative—so how can it be right to read him that way? Moreover, there’s a reason to think those notions can’t be valuative, given the structural status he gives them in Dasein’s analysis. If we all must fall into das Man, how can it be wrong or bad to do so?
We face a quandary here. Heidegger depicts this condition in a manner that is clearly calculated to make it unattractive and unappealing, to make us indeed ashamed to discover ourselves so. But all the while he stoutly denies that he means anything negative, and insists on falling’s structural role: “the interpretation has a purely ontological aim and is far removed from a moralizing critique of everyday Dasein” [BT g167; also g175–76, BP 160].
The problem, we’ve seen, is that he seems to have two conflict-ing roles for das Man and falling. On the one hand they are something essential to us, one of the three aspects of our being-in. They are allied, in this role, with talk or Rede, forming one of the three basic stances which together constitute our intentionality. We examined them in this role just now in Chapter 4.5.
But das Man and falling play a different role in the existential story we turn to now. They receive, above all, a value—a strongly negative value. And they receive it in a way that calls on us to try to escape or overcome this condition (of falling, of being das Man). Being and Time subtly but surely makes an appeal to its readers to change themselves in these respects—and thus strongly implies that they’re able to change.
How can falling be both something structural-essential, and something we should strive to overcome? The pragmatic and existential themes intersect here, but falling’s respective roles in them seem inconsistent. To serve as the “hinge” between these analyses it seems it might need to bear contradictory properties.6
The answer to this puzzle has, I think, a general character that others have suggested before: das Man and falling are structural and inevitable as tendencies, but these tendencies can take effect to varying degrees. There is, as it were, a steady momentum in us to fall, and this tendency ensures that we are constantly, in places or parts of our very complex intending, falling indeed. However, we can also oppose this tendency, steady as it is—can push (as it were) against it, thereby reducing, in places and parts, “how fast” (or “far”) we fall. There are, besides, some places where it is especially important to overcome falling—and to do so there (yet not nearly everywhere) is to be authentic.
This general answer must be supplemented by a second point: there are two distinct sources of falling, on which Heidegger takes quite different views. The first source we’ve seen in Chapter 4: the basic stance of Rede or talk involves aligning with das Man. Every time we use language we defer to the authority of what one says (are the meanings of these words). This impetus towards falling is indeed something structural, and Heidegger raises no complaint against it. We can’t imagine it away without stripping our world of its linguistic articulation (and all its other structuring by our sociality)—and without that there is no world.
What we meet gradually, with the existential theme, is a second source or impetus to falling. It turns out, as we look further into Dasein, that there are features of our deep structure that are difficult or painful for us to face. We recoil from these difficult truths, and this recoil adds to the steady slide involved in talk. It adds a motive, not present in the slide itself; it turns it into a “flight” or avoiding. It’s this extra impetus that makes falling pernicious for Heidegger—makes it fully “inauthentic.” It lets that stance of Rede or talk, in which we “mean things from” the community, swamp the other two aspects of our intentionality, in which we mean things from our ends, and in our feeling; it brings us into structural imbalance.
Let’s remind ourselves of the first source of falling. We saw that what’s essential to us is talk’s stance outward towards others, and especially towards the generality of others with whom we identify and try to fit. We have an essential tendency to understand ourselves in relation to “what one says,” “what one does”; this is one of the three “vectors” from which we mean (intend) things and ourselves: things mean what the general use of our language determines them to mean. So das Man is the who of the social group whose meanings I mainly lean back upon. And it is my who too, to the extent that I do so rely on it: I identify with it, in order to mean things so.
Without such entry into das Man there would be no language, since we can only speak and hear by aligning and subordinating ourselves to the common practice.7 And without language there would be no world, since the network of practical involvements needs words, in order to have the articulation of a world. So this tendency is a “condition of the possibility” of our intentionality.
It’s this impetus towards das Man that is to the fore in §27, where Heidegger introduces the notion. He stresses the structural role: “Das Man is an existential; and belongs as an originary phenomenon to Dasein’s positive constitution” [BT g129]. In this role das Man gives me most of my world. Beginning at an early age I acquire by imitation and training—most centrally, by learning language—the great bulk of my abilities and projects. So “das Man prescribes that way of interpreting the world and being-in-the-world which lies closest. Das Man itself … articulates the referential context of sig-nificance” [g129]. My self is das Man insofar as I have my projects because they are “what one does”; I engage in them so that I can comport with the general practice. I pursue them as “norms.”
This is not to say, however, that our subjection to das Man is complete or uniform. “How compellingly and explicitly it dominates, can change historically” [BT g129]. And it can be resisted and overcome by individuals, in some manner and to some degree: “The self of everyday Dasein is das Man-selbst, which we distinguish from the authentic, which means ownly grasped self” [g129]. Although we must defer to das Man if we’re to have an articulated world, still we can also individuate ourselves against this background deference. Since das Man is an essential existential, such authenticity must be just a form of it: “Authentic being-one’s-self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from das Man; it is rather an existentiell modification of das Man—of das Man as an essential existential” [g130].
Here in §27 Heidegger only hints at the second, non-structural ground of falling, which makes his clear dissatisfaction with the condition puzzling. But he gestures at this second source in a paragraph I quote in full:
Thus das Man unburdens the particular Dasein in its everydayness. Not only that; with this unburdening of being it accommodates Dasein insofar as it has the tendency to take and make things easy. And because das Man constantly accommodates the particular Dasein with this unburdening of being, it keeps and hardens its stubborn dominion.
[g127–28]
Here he mentions a certain motive for falling: a tendency to “take things easy,” which different Dasein have to different degrees. But in Chapter 4 we hear no more of this other source.
Heidegger returns to das Man in the second half of Chapter 5, and here too the first reason is uppermost, as we see in the account of chat [Gerede] in §35. This is the form talk or Rede takes for das Man. Although Heidegger’s account of it is strongly deprecating, he still presents it as an aspect of the “generic drift” at work in talk as the third essential aspect of being-in.
A language is itself a communal property constantly reworked, and trained into each new member. As each acquires it, he/she acquires the “average” understanding “already deposited in what’s spoken out [Aussprochenheit]” [BT g168]. This average understanding acquired in just learning the language requires no direct acquaintance with the matters the language is about: what we get is a capacity to talk about doing things with things, but only indirectly a capacity to do them. So: “In accordance with the average understandability that already lies in the language … the communicated talk can be largely understood, without the hearer bringing himself into an originary understanding towards what the talk is about” [g168].
Most of my world is laid out for me only by my knowing how to talk about it, and most of my exchanges with others employ only this indirect know-how. Even where my understanding does come to ground in direct abilities—to do and not just to talk about doing—I lapse constantly back into an average understanding, and need over and again to win back a genuine grasp. “This everyday interpretedness, into which Dasein has firstly grown, never lets it detach itself. In it, out of it, and against it are accomplished all genuine understanding, interpreting, and communicating” [BT g169].
“Chat” is talk that has detached itself from an “originary understanding” of its topics, and contents itself with that “average understandability” deposited in the language. “Chat is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the topic one’s own” [BT g169]. Chat is content with this indirect relation to its content, because what it cares about is just the talking. It cares, that is, about the conversational situation, and about “saying the right thing” in it. So whereas talk can function to “hold the world open for us in an articulated understanding,” in chat it serves instead to close it off, and to cover up the entities within-the-world; so it “perverts [verkehrt] the disclosing into a closing off” [g169].
The point, I think, is that here talk, one basic stance in our intentionality, too much rules the other two. Being with others swamps our competence at things, and even our feeling ourselves, so that we speak—and intend—too thoroughly with a view to “sharing” with others. Heidegger relies on an implicit contrast with the condition in which these three stances (grasping, feeling, wording) collaborate more equally. He relies, that is, on a version of the “functional” argument: chat is an imbalance and malfunction in Dasein’s existential structure.
This functional argument is tied up with an epistemic one. When our basic existentials—projection, self-finding, and talk—collaborate properly, they “hold the world open” for us. Then talk doesn’t distract from our direct concern with things, but plays its proper role of “articulating” our grasp of them. And similarly with our self-finding in moods: language can help us to know ourselves better in these, if our aim isn’t principally at sharing in them. So the complaint against chat is epistemic too: it “closes off and covers up.”
But why does talk tend thus to dominate? It’s not talk itself that explains this, but another factor that enters on the side of talk, and unbalances Dasein towards it. Heidegger begins to suggest this other factor when he turns next (in §36), to “curiosity” [Neugier], another feature of everydayness. Curiosity is a distortion in “seeing” that expresses our need for “distraction” [Zerstreuung]: it “seeks unrest and excitement through constant novelty and changing encounters” [BT g172]. Our curiosity absorbs us in things, but in a way that stays at their surface. It craves the intensity of the first look and grasp; it avoids “dwelling” on things so as really to know them. Heidegger doesn’t explain why Dasein so craves this distraction, but it clearly isn’t due to that generic drift in Rede, towards das Man.
The presence of a second factor becomes still clearer when Heidegger introduces falling in §38. He presents it as having two sides, which correlate, I think, to chat and curiosity. Falling carries us into das Man, but it also absorbs us in the world. It is “completely dazed by the ‘world’ and by the Dasein-with of others in das Man” [BT g176]. This absorption in worldly concerns shows up not just in curiosity, but in our everyday “industry” [g177], the way we “lose ourselves” in our tasks. This absorption in things isn’t well-explained by the impetus we’ve seen comes from Rede.
Falling is a broader phenomenon than das Man, since (I suggest) it can involve “losing oneself” in any of the three basic stances, projection, feeling, or talk. So it has three possible forms, each involving an excess in one of those stances. The excess in Rede is chat and immersion in das Man. The excess in projection is that absorption in things, that industry, which Heidegger often stresses instead. And the excess in feeling, which I do not think he mentions, would be self-distraction by intense sensation or emotion. Since falling has this generality, there must be another source for it besides the impetus towards likening in Rede.
Heidegger tries to make us see and feel that falling is not just attracted in its fall (into sharing, for example), but must also be avoiding—indeed recoiling from—something else. Only an aversion could explain the urgency with which we plunge into distractions of such various kinds. He in fact already identifies, here in Chapter 5, what falling is away from, but only very schematically: Dasein has “fallen away [abgefallen] from itself as an authentic ability-to-be-self” [BT g175; also g176]. But he doesn’t tell us what could be so painful or disturbing about itself to provoke this flight from it.
2. Anxiety
Unlike Rede’s tendency towards sharing, the second impetus into falling is not structural and indispensable, but in the nature of a contingent motive. As such it is also an impetus we can hope to overcome or eliminate—by contrast with the inevitable pull to share. So it’s this second tendency that plays the main role in the existential drama Heidegger goes on to relate.
The main logic of the motive is that it is a fleeing from something. The idea that falling is a flight [Flucht] is absent from Chapter 4 and 5; it first appears in §40 of Chapter 6, in the course of introducing anxiety. “Dasein’s absorption in das Man and its absorption in the “world” of its concern, manifest something like a flight of Dasein before [vor] itself as an authentic ability-to-be-self” [BT g184]. This new notion of flight gives a crucial turn to Heidegger’s diagnosis of falling.
What this flight is from, above all, is “facing” something, i.e. facing a truth; so it has an epistemic character. Heidegger claims such flight is typical of everydayness, and draws several crucial conclusions from this. They flow from the simple point that we only flee something we already have some inkling of. And when we flee “facing” some truth, it must be because we already, in some manner, recognize it.
A first consequence is simply the priority in intentional logic here: more basic than the ignorance we flee into, is the recognition that motivates the flight. This changes the status of falling, insofar as it seeks such ignorance: it turns out that it is not as “originary” or ultimate as it had seemed. Since it is a flight, it presupposes a prior understanding—though of course this will have that implicit and background character we’ve been noticing. “[T]o be thus closed off [in falling] is merely the privation of a disclosure which manifests itself phenomenally in the fact that Dasein’s flight is a flight before itself” [BT g184].
This is why Heidegger reverses his early claim that falling everydayness is primary or basic. It is indeed far more usual than anxiety: “under the ascendancy of falling and publicness, ‘authentic’ anxiety is rare” [BT g190]. Nevertheless, because falling is a flight that presupposes recognition of the threat, anxiety is logically and intentionally prior to falling: “The tranquillized and familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of Dasein’s uncanniness, not the reverse. The not-at-home must be conceived existential-ontologically as the more originary phenomenon” [g189].
A second implication is that we, as phenomenologists, can hope to identify what’s fled by paying attention to the manner of the flight. What’s fled is disclosed in the flight, though in the “privative mode” of avoidance. “[I]n turning away from it, it is disclosed ‘there’. This existentiell-ontical turning away gives, phenomenally, on the ground of its character as a disclosure, the possibility of grasping the before-what of the flight” [BT g185]. Of course the phenomenologist will again need special methods to “wrest” this disclosure from experience aimed to hide it.
A third important point Heidegger draws from this flight is valuative: he encourages us to infer that it’s reprehensible (I think this is not too strong an illocutionary force to hear in his depictions of falling and das Man). We should be ashamed of fleeing in this way. Being and Time tries to encourage us to stand fast and face what we thus usually avoid.
Now not all flight is reprehensible—what makes this so? Heidegger’s first reason is its epistemic character: the flight is from a truth. And he can presume in his readers a prior value of self-understanding: it’s what brings them to him. Beyond this, such epistemic flight has features that make it unappealing. Where an opposing force is too great, it makes perfect sense to avoid engaging it, and to try to stand out of its range. But it looks less sensible to ignore it or deny its existence. Moreover, this epistemic flight involves self-deception, and brings us into contradiction with ourselves: we superimpose an ignorance on a deeper recognition.
Heidegger’s second reason why this flight is reprehensible is (as I put it on p. 131) functional: the flight subverts proper working. What we flee is precisely the battle that it most belongs to us, as Dasein, to fight. Here Heidegger relies on a claim to have uncovered a kind of ultimate essence, which involves an ultimate task. Dasein is the entity that “goes about” its own being, i.e. which takes the reflexive view upon itself; this is its mineness. Heidegger will present flight as a failure at this ultimate task—as giving up the effort to accomplish this mineness. As we follow his analysis of falling’s flight, in this section and the next, we’ll see how he implicitly relies on these two kinds of support for his evaluations and judgments against it.
Let’s turn now to the question what Dasein flees. Heidegger has many answers, among them: itself, its being, the world, death, and guilt. But his immediate answer is anxiety [Angst], and its uncanniness [Unheimlichkeit]. “The falling flight into the at-home [Zuhause] of publicness is a flight before the not-at-home, which means the uncanniness” [BT g189].8 Anxiety is the proximate “what” that falling flees, because it is the “facing”; the other whats falling flees are the things it is so difficult to face. So anxiety’s crucial status is epistemic: it reveals deep truth, in the kind of uncovering adequate to it.
Anxiety is another of Heidegger’s most characteristically “existential” notions. There’s an analogous idea playing a similar structural role in most other existential systems. All give special importance to a feeling of discontent or malaise, directed not at any failures in our dealings or achievements, but at something deeper and more pervasive, a flaw or problem in our own structure. Anxiety is a self-finding [Befindlichkeit] or mood, but a very special one, in which we “find” something essential about ourselves—something that did not yet emerge in the pragmatic analysis that preceded.
Heidegger approaches anxiety by distinguishing it from fear, another mood which is structurally similar, but which “finds” us in mere contingencies.9 Fear is of or about some entity within-the-world, something that threatens one of my projects or ends. But in anxiety the threat comes “from nothing and nowhere”: there’s no thing (or things) we’re anxious over, and no goal we see some hindrance to. Anxiety is over something more sweeping and essential: it is “before” [vor] and “about” [um] being-in-the-world itself [BT g187].
Fear posits a threat to some project, so we feel it within that project—as a risk to its concern. In feeling fear we “find” ourselves at risk, due to our commitment to some project. Anxiety by contrast is of or about a threat to our very ability to have projects. It is the feeling of that threat, or indeed of that inability. So anxiety involves a loss of momentum and engagement in our projects—of ability to care about their ends. It is this detachment, but felt painfully as an inability to reattach myself: I wish I could sink back into caring about them, but have lost the knack.
So in anxiety the world looks pointless, “has the character of complete meaninglessness” [BT g186]. The things around me fail to solicit my interest by engaging my projects: there seems nothing worth doing with them. “The “world” can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of others” [g187]. Even my leading ambitions, my life-goals, lose their appeal for me; I can’t see how I managed to care about them. I feel how they are contingent, arbitrary, and inherently worthless—whether or not I entertain or believe any of these claims.
Anxiety, then, is a kind of breakdown, but not within any of our projects. It is a breakdown in our second-order ability to connect ourselves to our projects, to “be-in” our world. As such, this breakdown is important phenomenologically. Indeed, it’s because it is “one of the most far-reaching and most originary possibilities of disclosure” [BT g182] that the discussion turns to anxiety in the first place.10
Those breakdowns in our first-order ability to accomplish our projects—when we’re stymied by broken equipment, for instance—“light up” how those projects matter to us. These experiences have an epistemic authority, and to know the particular structure of my personal concerns, my world, I will need to appeal to them. Anxiety, as a breakdown in the second-order ability to have projects at all, lights up things more basic and universal.
So, first, anxiety shows me my world as a whole. In my alienation from my projects, I “see” them all stretched inertly before me, conspicuous precisely by my painful disengagement from them. So whereas a first-order breakdown lights up some local sector of my world—the part threatened by the broken tool—anxiety lights up my world as a world, in toto. “[O]n the ground of this meaninglessness of [what is] within-the-world only the world in its worldhood still obtrudes itself” [BT g187].
More importantly, anxiety also lights up my relation to this world, my being-in. I notice, by feeling its absence, how I am usually engaged with the world by projecting at ends and having things matter accordingly. I notice, as well, how these projects come to me especially from the authority of das Man, whose appeal is now lost. Anxiety shows, in fact, all three aspects of being-in, and their interconnection. For Heidegger immediately uses it, in the following §41, to tie these aspects together into a single structure. That is, anxiety is supposed to show us how our grasping, feeling, and wording constitute a unity, which he calls “care” [Sorge].
But anxiety shows me my world by disengaging me from it. It especially detaches me from projects that I have had in an everyday way, i.e. by falling into them, by taking them over from and as das Man. Anxiety deprives das Man of its tranquillizing effect: the assurance that in “doing what one does” I am doing what’s really worth doing. It is a breakdown especially in my ability to let the general practice settle my ends. “Anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself fallingly, from the world and the public interpretedness” [BT g187]. It is the feeling of pointlessness and dislocation that ensues once the support of customary values is lost, and I am left to my own devices, “individualized” [g188]. “This individualization brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it authenticity and inauthenticity as possibilities of its being” [g191].
By this disengagement from my projects I thus discover, by feeling it, a deeper level to my intentionality. I experience how grasping, feeling, and wording have been making my meaning all along. But I experience this in alienation from it, and hence “before” having this meaning (this world, these ends) at all. My projects themselves become mere possibilities, and I find myself as the entity confronted with these options. So I find that “before” all those tasks I have within my projects, I’m confronted with the more fundamental task of deciding which of these projects will be mine. And, suited to this task, I discover in myself a deeper ability, a kind of meta-know-how.
Heidegger puts it this way: “Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its being towards its ownmost ability-to-be, which means its being-free for the freedom of choosing and taking hold of itself” [BT g188]. My “ownmost” ability is my second-order capacity to choose among these projects; exercising this aright will be authenticity. Falling is, in fact, an effort to avoid exercising this capacity. It gives over the responsibility for the choice to das Man, and aims and values out of its sociality. So it is a kind of “choosing not to choose.” Anxiety is a breakdown in my ability to ignore the choice.11
So anxiety feels not that meta-ability to choose, but precisely an inability for this task. This is why it is a distressing and uncomfortable stance or attitude. It is disengaged from projects and unable to reengage, either by falling back into its average concerns, or by a personal choice. So we might say that anxiety is a seriousness about oneself, but a seriousness that can make no progress. I can’t lean back on the public understanding, I have lost that cushioning. But I’m unable to handle by myself the work that had been done by das Man.
Anxiety experiences how hard individual choice really is, since it needs to be “in the face of” deep structural problems in Dasein. Anxiety faces these problems too, having lost falling’s way of avoiding them. We turn next to these structures, death and guilt. Since falling flees anxiety as a painful confrontation with them, they are deeper answers to the question “what falling flees.”
3. Existential concerns
We turn now to specify what anxiety is anxious about—the truth that it so uncomfortably faces. We’ve seen that it is anxious about being-in-the-world—but which aspects or features of this is anxiety directed upon? Here we come, as it were, to the source: to the ultimate reason for the falling that infects everydayness. Heidegger’s answer is “death” and “guilt.”12 But he has very special meanings for these, which require careful adjustments from the words’ usual senses.
Death and guilt are the topics of Division II’s first two chapters; here the existential issues are at center stage. Division II has the overall aim of deepening the analysis of Dasein offered in Division I; the latter was merely “provisional,” because it focused on Dasein’s average everydayness. Heidegger now aims at a more, or indeed at a most originary [ursprünglichste: BT g17] account, by widening the analysis beyond everydayness, so as to bring the “whole” [Ganze] of Dasein into view, and to reveal the “unity” [Einheit] of this full structure.
Division I’s map of Dasein’s essential structures was drawn with the eye on everydayness. That focus was appropriate, inasmuch as that is how we live “firstly and mostly”; no other starting-point is as appropriate. But we have begun to realize that there are aspects of our condition that won’t readily emerge given that focus, since everydayness “flees” them, and suppresses its own awareness of them. We’ve noticed them by noticing how everydayness “turns away” from them, but now we should examine the special, nonaverage conditions in which Dasein “turns towards” these aspects that everydayness shuns. These special conditions will be more directly illuminating of our full structure.
We saw that falling flees anxiety. If anxiety is over death and guilt, then falling ultimately flees these, and this is where our existential challenge or difficulty finally lies. Our challenge will be, to “face” these and live properly with them. While largely deferring until section 4 that proper response (authenticity), we can address several questions about the problems (death and guilt) themselves. Why is it hard for us to face them—why do we flee them? Why do they provoke anxiety? And how does it help us avoid them, to lose ourselves in das Man?
i. Death
Division II’s Chapter 1 is devoted to death.13 Heidegger leads into the topic (in the introductory §46) in pursuit of Dasein’s “wholeness.” It seems that as long as Dasein is alive it is incomplete. For it is always “ahead-of-itself,” i.e. defined by possibilities not yet realized. “In the essence of the basic constitution of Dasein lies a constant unsettledness. The lack of totality signifies something missing [Ausstand] in the ability-to-be” [BT g236]. So it might seem that Dasein is only complete in death. But although there is nothing “still outstanding” when Dasein ceases to project, there is also no Dasein. It therefore seems that Dasein can never be “whole.”
It quickly emerges, however, that this very question about Dasein’s wholeness is misguided, because it rests on a misinterpretation of Dasein as something at-hand (an “object”). And this makes Heidegger’s route from wholeness to death seem a red herring—a misleading excuse for introducing death. He will try to vindicate the connection in the end, however. For it will turn out that (a proper) anticipation of death—not the event of it—makes one indeed “whole” in the sense appropriate to what we are.
Now our own route to the topic of death has been from anxiety: death is one of the things anxiety is anxious about. Death, Heidegger says, is a structural limit in or to us, which we prefer not to face, and which renders us anxious when we do.
So put, however, this seems a very trite point. That we’re mortal, that the life of each of us will come to an end, that we are worried about this mortality, and often prefer not to think about it—all of this is obvious enough, and Heidegger would have little merit in resaying it. Yet he thinks he has strange and surprising things to tell us about death. His treatment of the topic is one of the most famous—and infamous—parts of the book, experienced by some as especially deep and inspiring, but by others as trivial, or nonsensical, or simply and plainly false.14 We here face in acute form the general challenge stemming from Heidegger’s claim to be reminding us of truths we already know, but somehow suppress or forget.
As I’ve mentioned, Heidegger means something different by “death” than we usually do, and some of those harsh judgments come from missing this change. But I think the difference or novelty in Heidegger’s notion can also be exaggerated. Some interpreters have read his notion in a way that takes it out of any direct relation to the biographical event of death. They make it related to the latter only by analogy or resemblance—referring instead to something like our “loss of possibilities.”15
But I don’t think Heidegger means to detach death so thoroughly from our ordinary sense; he’s not so drastically changing the topic. Instead, his main shift is to treat death “as a possibility,” i.e. within our projective intentionality, rather than as an at-hand, objective event. “Death is, as the end of Dasein, in the being of this entity towards its end” [BT g259]. Death is a very special such possibility, and one that is not contingent but built into the structure of our intentionality. But this possibility stands, we’ll see, in very tight relation to that objective event. It is, in a certain sense, “about” that event, and therefore competes with all the ways we usually think about it. The latter need to be reformed by the discovery of death as possibility.
What’s hard for us is to see death as possibility. It’s hard generally to notice possibilities as possibilities—they’re transparent to the actualizations they intend. But it’s especially hard to grasp death as possibility, because of the peculiar possibility it is. We avoid facing death as possibility by misinterpreting it as an objective event. This motivated misunderstanding of death is reinforced by a network of social practices designed to hide death’s way of being possible; this is one of the most important functions of das Man.
Anxiety, however, is a breakdown in that everyday coping with death—a felt breakdown. And again the breakdown has an epistemic pay-off: anxiety faces death—has the truth about death—by virtue of so feeling it. It turns us back towards our own death, from our falling flight from it: “Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety” [BT g266]. So as the phenomenologist studies death, he/she will pay special attention to what anxiety reveals.
Let’s look at the elements of this account more closely, following the chapter’s order of discussion. After the introductory §46, Heidegger moves towards his positive account via a prolonged examination of the ways we ordinarily “get death wrong.” I will summarize these critical sections, and then expand when we come to the concluding section (§53), where his focus finally turns to the positive notion.
§47 rebuts the idea that since we can’t have experienced our own death, we must understand death by attending to the death of others. It offers an acute phenomenology for how we intend (think about) dead others, but insists that each must understand death from—and for the sake of—his/her own case. One Dasein can’t substitute for another with regards to death, as we can in our public roles. “No one can take the other’s dying away from him” [BT g240]. The insistence that our principal relation is to our own death, and that others, alive or dead, are of no real help in forming this relation, is a key point in Heidegger’s treatment of death.16 “Death is, insofar as it ‘is’, in each case mine [je der meine]” [g240]. So we must understand death as possibility, and as mine.
§48 examines the idea that death is an Ausstand, i.e. a completion that is missing or “in the offing” (Macquarrie and Robinson translate it “something still outstanding”). Heidegger reviews a subtle variety of ways this can be true of such things as debts (to be paid), fruit (ripening), and the moon (waxing to full). But the inevitable conclusion is that none of these is an apt model for death [BT g244]. Nor is death an “end” in some usual senses: it’s not Dasein’s fulfillment, nor its stopping, nor its being finished, nor its disappearing. What’s wrong with all of these is that they are at-hand events that will accomplish an objective culmination or conclusion to a process. But death is as we are towards it, in our first-personal (reflexive) aiming.
§49 is again mainly negative, distinguishing our existential inquiry into death from the ways biology, psychology, and theology treat it. Biology studies the event of “perishing” [Verenden] in which an organism’s life stops; in Dasein’s case we can call this event “demise” [Ableben]. But we have already seen how irrelevant these events are. Heidegger also dismisses the most familiar kind of psychological study of death: “a psychology of ‘dying [Sterben]’ gives information about the ‘living’ of the ‘one dying’ rather than about dying itself” [BT g247]. Such studies treat the ways people cope in emergency or “death bed” situations, whereas we are looking for the way in which every Dasein is always being-towards-death. Nor is theology helpful. The question of an afterlife—whether I or part of me will survive my bodily death—is irrelevant to the analysis of our being-towards-death, since the latter is the primary or background attitude to which all questioning about an afterlife responds [g247–48].17 In §50 Heidegger gives a glimpse—though a quite schematic one—of his positive account. My relation to death, as “my possibility”—a relation that precedes and underlies all my efforts to ignore it—runs along all three of the dimensions of human meaning: my projection, thrownness, and falling (my grasping, feeling, and wording). First, I project towards death in my planning and devising: I take account of this possibility (“of no-longerbeing-able-to-be-there” [BT g250]) in my purposiveness. Second, I am “thrown into” death, inasmuch as I also feel it a certain way: I feel it above all in the mood of anxiety—and not in that of fear, as might have been expected. But third, I am also related to my death in my social being, i.e. in the words, sayings, customs by which my community, das Man, deals with death. And here is where “firstly and mostly Dasein covers up its ownmost being-towards-death, fleeing before it” [g251].
§51 returns to the negative: Heidegger tries to show how this everyday way of being-towards-death, embedded in our common language and practices, expresses the effort to conceal or evade (facing) death. He details how our ordinary ways of talking about death, in our prevalent “chat,” exhibit “concealing evasion before death” [BT g253]. In our everyday, “public” being-with one another it is of course recognized that people die, but this is taken as irrelevant to us now. Our talk “wants to say: one dies too, in the end, but immediately [zunächst] one stays unconcerned” [g253]. In this conversational stance we almost always adopt towards one another, we presume death relevant only where it is actual—concealing its true status as possibility. This evasion of death even extends to the death-bed: “the ‘neighbors’ often still talk into the ‘dying one’ that he will escape death and soon return to the tranquillized everydayness of the world of his concern” [g253]. Within this customary viewpoint anxiety over death gets interpreted as fear before an approaching event, and is stigmatized as a weakness. So chat guards against our taking death seriously.
But although we evade death in everydayness, this evasion is still a way of being-towards it. Thus a phenomenologist can still find out what death is, by examining what everydayness avoids. And this is what §52 proceeds to do, focusing especially on the “certainty” [Gewissheit] of death. Our public stance—our chat—does not deny death’s certainty, but misinterprets it so as to remove its sting. So I conceive of my death as an event lying ahead of me on a time-line. I concede that this event is certain to happen, but I diminish this certainty as merely empirical: “So far as one knows, all humans ‘die’” [BT g257]. And by placing it at some indefinite but substantial distance from me (it’s non-adjacent), I take away from death’s certainty a most important aspect: “das Man covers up what is peculiar to death’s certainty, that it is possible at any moment. With the certainty of death goes the indefiniteness of its when” [g258].
It is by its indefiniteness that this possibility bears in its distinctive way on all my other possibilities. It is the possibility of being no longer able to project, and the indefiniteness of this puts all my projects at constant risk: I can lose at any moment my ability to be anything at all. So the indefiniteness of death makes it a constant threat to all the projects I identify myself by; this is why it’s so unsettling, and why we try to ignore it. It also makes this ignoring especially unapt: if the possibility did lie at a fixed distance from us, it might be more excusable to defer attention to a later date. But by the kind of possibility it is, death is relevant in every moment.
For phenomenology, that very way I “chat” with myself about death reveals the more complete certainty I have of it: the latter motivates this chat. This certainty is not empirical, not in the “graded order of evidence about the at-hand” [BT g265], because it lies not in any beliefs or theories but in a deep-lying foreboding.18 I push my death off to that distance and treat it as irrelevant “until I get close,” as a way to hold off the anxiety before death that is always waiting “in the background” for me. I do know and feel that death can come at any moment, but I keep it in that background by repeating the commonsense account of death that I learn in das Man.
In the last and longest section on death, §53, Heidegger describes an “authentic being-towards-death,” which turns back from this falling flight to face death. He presents this only as a theoretical construction, and will not claim to confirm its feasibility until he treats conscience in Chapters 2. I will defer until the next section talking about this authentic stance itself—it will be important to connect it with authenticity towards guilt as well. Here I’ll skim off what §53 tells us about death itself—which authenticity grasps, since it chooses “in the light of” death. So what, finally, is it?
I’ve said that the most important point is that death “is possibility.” Heidegger has stressed this all along, but just what it means comes out best as he finally describes what an adequate grasp of it “as possibility” requires. It’s not enough, for example, to think about (or brood over) my future death. This treats death as possibility to the extent of viewing it as “something that is coming,” but it “weakens” the possibility by “a calculating will to arrange about death” [BT g261]. Similarly, “expecting” [erwarten] death is to wait for its actualization, so that even here there is a “leaping away from the possible and finding foothold in the actual” [g262].
Indeed, death is a distinctive possibility inasmuch as it defies our effort to think of it as actual—to think it so from a first-person point of view, that is. (I can imagine my corpse, of course, but that treats me as at-hand, and grasps only my demise.) My other possibilities I can imagine myself achieving (or undergoing); I can anticipate how it would be to enact (or suffer) them. Death is distinctive in that it “offers no support for being intent upon something, ‘picturing’ to oneself the possible actuality, and thereby forgetting its possibility” [BT g262]. Death is “pure possibility,” since it is not a way for me to be, but to become (or be towards). This unimaginableness of death can, if we pay attention, bring home to us how it is a possibility, and indeed what it is to be a possibility. And when we learn this lesson about death, we can learn to see our other possibilities as such as well.
As possibility, death is an intentum, something given in my projection, which is precisely and only as I am concerned about it. So we must consider it, as PH 312 puts it, “as a pure phenomenon.” This shows us how Heideggerian death is still related to the event of demise. Death-as-possibility is “of” or “about” my cessation, the concluding of my life. But in our phenomenological study of Dasein this event—when and how it happens—is irrelevant. What matters is how I am towards the possibility: how I cope with it, and how I shape and mean it in my coping. The possibility is constituted by my ability or capacity in coping—once again by my knowing-how. “Being a possibility essentially means being capable of this being-possible” [PH 315].19
Of course it is not something I strive towards, as I do my for-whiches or goals. Nevertheless it is something that is what it is as I am towards it in a projective know-how, in a deep and pervasive striving. I am always in the midst of coping with this possibility, though of course “in the background.” This know-how is partly, of course, my strategies for postponing the event (my demise). But, more importantly, it is my strategies for living with that indefinite possibility, which no amount of that prophylaxis can remove. It is the way I practice the pursuit of all of my other possibilities given this abiding constant threat to them.
It’s not only in this special way it’s a possibility, but in the special way it’s “mine,” that death is distinctive. Death is my “ownmost” and “non-relational” possibility. It is ownmost in that in this possibility Dasein’s “very being is at issue” [BT g263]. It is non-relational in that I alone can deal with it, so that it “individualizes Dasein down to itself” [g263]. So death is “my” possibility in ways that none of my others is: the latter I copy from others, and I’m replaceable by others in them—in their usual or everyday forms, they’re all social and socializing. Death is a possibility I have by my own essential structure, and this possibility cannot be grasped in the terms I get from my linguistic and social side.
As Heidegger puts it in PH, “I am this ‘I can’ in a superlative sense. For I am this ‘I can die at any moment’” [313]. Death is superlatively mine because I have it as my possibility independently of any and all of the social meanings embedded in my language and practices. The roles, identities, and aims I pursue all have their meanings by the social-linguistic matrix I inherit and join: that determines what these roles mean and require, not I. And what matters for this matrix is merely that someone performs this role, not whether it’s I. It’s in this sense that I’m replaceable in it.
But I have death as a possibility “before” my entry into this contingent social domain—that is, at a deeper, more original level. I stand in a relation to it that has not been structured by language or by any of the prevailing social practices and outlooks on death. Its priority is shown by the way it (partly) motivates and explains my embrace of those structures. So I need to locate this original relation to death “beneath” all those structurings of it—to see how I “mean” it underneath all the ways I think about it. This is my relation to my death—to death as my possibility, not a possibility there for anyone else inhabiting that language and practices.
The lesson of death will work this way, then: seeing the special way in which death is a possibility, and is mine, I learn to stand towards my other possibilities as possibilities and as mine, as well. This shifts my deep relation to all of my ends (or for-whiches). But we’ll wait for this until section 4 looks at authenticity.
ii. Guilt
Some of these points about death hold for guilt as well, and noting a few of the parallels will give us quick access to much of it. It stands at the same structural level in Dasein as death, but whereas the latter is a feature of our projection, guilt has to do with our thrownness or self-finding. Death is mainly given to us in projection’s way, as a possibility, and guilt is mainly given in self-finding’s way, by our feeling ourselves so thrown. But guilt, like death, is repellent to us, so that we usually avoid that recognition—except in authenticity, which embraces it.
Because guilt is a structural element in our intentionality, we must distinguish it from what we ordinarily call guilt. Just as death is not an event, so guilt is not any such fact about us as that we have sinned or done something wrong. Such facts could hold whether or not we notice them in any way. But guilt—as Heidegger means it—has its identity solely as an intentional object, uncovered by phenomenology, not by theology or morality.
I will try to substantiate these parallels between death and guilt. But I must acknowledge that there is a great asymmetry in Heidegger’s handling of them. Death is the focus of all of Chapter 1, but Chapters 2 concerns authenticity, and guilt comes in only midway, as what conscience calls to us, in spurring us towards authenticity. I’ll come back to this fuller project—as well as to “conscience”—in Chapters 2 when I treat authenticity in the next section. Here I’ll focus on the treatment of guilt in §58, drawing from the surrounding sections where they add important points.
Guilt [Schuld] becomes a topic in Chapters 2 because it is what conscience calls to us: it calls “Guilty!” As an essential element in our intentionality, conscience has something important to say. The challenge is to grasp the genuine sense of this call. Once again Heidegger begins—and spends most of his time—telling us what this existential guilt is not, i.e. ruling out our ordinary senses for the term. Above all he rules out all accounts of guilt as a real or objective fact. It is not, for example, a matter of some “lack, as a failure of something that should and can be” [BT g283]. This treats guilt as something at-hand, a fact (or not) about me that others can know as well or better than I do. Instead, my guilt lies in a certain way I take myself to be guilty.
Heidegger then offers a “formal” definition of the term: “we determine the formally existential idea of the ‘guilty’ thus: being-the-ground for a being that is determined by a not [Nicht]—i.e. being-the-ground of a nullity [Nichtigkeit]” [BT g283]. He soon adds that this ground is also “null,” so that guilt involves two nullities. Dasein’s being-a-ground is its thrownness, and this grounds its projection. Hence one nullity lies in thrownness, another in projection, and together these are our guilt: “Care—the being of Dasein—thus means as thrown projection: The (null) being-the-ground of a nullity” [g285].
What, first, is the nullity in our projection? Heidegger presents it this way: “as able-to-be [Dasein] stands in each case in one or another possibility, it constantly is not others and has foregone these in its existentiell projection. … Freedom, though, is only in the choice of one, i.e. in bearing not having chosen and not being able to choose others” [BT g285]. So my projection limits me at the same time that it identifies me: the choice of this possibility (whichever I aim at) involves renouncing indefinitely many others. Since I am my possibility, I deprive myself of those other identities.20
I take it to be implicit here that these foregone possibilities are no less valuable, intrinsically, than whatever one we choose. Indeed it may even be presumed that no possibilities have any intrinsic value. Here Heidegger concurs in the familiar existentialist idea that we’re confronted with a “groundless choice.” And since this nullity in projection is the one referred to in the initial “formal” definition of guilt—whereas the nullity in thrownness is added secondarily—it seems to be the main point of guilt. Surprisingly, however, Heidegger relies very little on this familiar idea; indeed this paragraph (on g285) is the only place he discusses this nullity, and he is brief about it here.
Instead his attention and weight are all on the other nullity, the one in our thrownness: it’s this he treats as the crucial element in guilt. In his main use, guilt is really just that thrownness itself, and the limitation or threat this is for projection. It is the way we always find ourselves “thrown into” a particular set of ends and projects. This thrownness, moreover, is impervious to projection, and can’t be taken up into it. “[Dasein] is never existent before its ground, but only from it and as this. Being-a-ground thus means never to have power over one’s ownmost being from the ground up. This not belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness” [BT g284].
Whereas the first nullity, and also death, are limits on projection within its own domain—ways it can’t make the future it wants for itself—this second nullity is projection’s restriction to that domain, its inability to work back on the past. (So the others are internal limits on projection, but guilt is an external limit.) Guilt is the way we are subjected to the past, which our forward-reaching projection can’t take control over. We are subjected not causally, but in the very structure of our meaning: we must mean our world “from behind,” as it were—in the other vector we saw belongs to self-finding. Our moods display this way we’ve been thrown and subjected.
This problem is Heidegger’s variation on an old family of problems. Classical forms include the body’s intractability to mind, and determinism’s threat to our freedom. A more recent ancestor is the problem Nietzsche devises will to power to solve: “the will’s inability to will backwards” (in Zarathustra ii.2 “On Redemption”). Heidegger claims phenomenology shows that the ultimate root to all these problems is a conflict built into our structure as intenders or meaners. The root problem, he thinks, is that Dasein “never comes back behind its thrownness so as to be able to itself first release this ‘that it is and has to be’ from its being-a-self” [BT g284; also g383].
The deep problem lies in a duality in our way of meaning or intending: we’re projective, but also mood-thrown, and both are essential to our intentionality. This division is the more disturbing to us because it makes a split between two ways we identify ourselves, two whos we are: I am my project-ends, but I am also my self-finding in moods. We will always find or feel ourselves as something different than we are making ourselves to be. We understand ourselves to be projecting from a self we also are, which is discrepant (of course) from the who we aspire to be.
We might put it: the conflict is between the two basic stances we take. On the one hand we are wrapped up in our striving and effecting, in what we’re trying to do and be. But on the other hand we are also registering what we’ve come to be, and registering this especially in our feeling: we feel how we’re doing, all the time we are doing. Often the latter stance serves the former: we keep track of how we’re doing at what we’re trying to do. But the more we pass over into this reflective view on ourselves, into “noticing how we are,” the more discrepancy opens up between this and our projective aspiration. So moods are often experienced as hindrances to our effort.
Notice that Heidegger sees this problem from the side of projection: it is a problem for my being the who I’m trying to be that I am also already just so. In the conflict between these aspects of intentionality, it is thrownness that appears as a limit on projection, and not the other way around. So guilt lies in a deep structural feature of our intending—but in this feature as it is itself intended or meant.
Guilt is not over something we could and should be doing but are failing to do. Indeed the way one “reckons up infractions [in rules and norms] and seeks equivalents” is a strategy to avoid our original guilt [BT g288]. We try to restrict guilt to the performance or non-performance of specified dos and don’ts. We try to understand it, like death, as something at-hand that we can bring under control. Just as we temper death by interpreting it as an event lying at an indefinite distance ahead, so we temper guilt by restricting it to concrete infractions.
The deep problem is not that I’ve done particular things in the past that I need to atone for—and thereby control or wipe clean. The problem is the way my projective meanings for things always need to share with meanings coming from the past—meaning thrown into things from behind me. So the “call of conscience” is not really directed against our trespasses; it’s a reminder of that insuperable limit. We can never overcome our guilt; our task is to be guilty authentically [BT g287].
Guilt is not just this structural problem as meant, but as felt. And not only is that structure constant, but we are constantly feeling it. In a typical move, Heidegger argues that even our feeling not guilty is a kind of evidence for this guilt, since we can see it as a self-concealing: “That this [originary being-guilty] remains firstly and mostly undisclosed, and is kept closed off by the falling being of Dasein, reveals just the mentioned nullity” [BT g286]. We fail to feel guilty by strategy, because implicitly we do feel it.
4. Authenticity
We come now to what might be called the answer to the various problems identified so far. As we’ve seen, these problems have three layers. First, we (phenomenologists) notice the falling in our everydayness, and the way we herd ourselves into das Man. Next we identify what that falling flees, the not-at-homeness of anxiety. And, third, we specify what this anxiety is before (over), death and guilt—the essential limits we grasp and feel ourselves to have. Authenticity then emerges as the adequate or appropriate stance towards death and guilt—and the answer to all three problems.
Our main sources on authenticity are §53 in Chapter 1 (of Division II), which describes an authentic being-towards-death, §60 in Chapters 2, which describes the authentic response to conscience’s call to our guilt, and §62 of Chapter 3, which argues (roughly) that these are really two aspects of authenticity that entail one another. (I defer the temporal accounts of authenticity, later in the book, until Chapter 6.) Heidegger calls authenticity as facing death “anticipation,” and authenticity as facing guilt “resoluteness.”
Heidegger’s two approaches to authenticity, via death and via guilt, have different epistemic status. He presents the authentic stance towards death hypothetically, as a way that Dasein might “become whole” by living with its death, but a way not yet sub-stantiated; it emerges “only as an ontological possibility” [BT g266]. We need to show that it is concretely possible, and this is what Heidegger thinks conscience does: conscience is a phenomenon we can all recognize in ourselves, which calls us to face our guilt, and thus to become authentic. So it “attests” [bezeugt] to the “existentiell possibility” of authenticity; it shows, as it were, that we can live it.21 (As we’ll see on pp. 168–69, conscience may “attest” in favor not just of authenticity’s possibility, but of its functional role—hence its value.)
Facing death and guilt pulls us out of our everyday concern. It sets us into a second-order relation to all this concern by making it problematic, “an issue.” Death shows projection that all its thrust forward is finite, moreover indefinitely finite. Guilt shows thrownness that it will always fail to rise to what projection wills. So they cast us out of our usual ways of thinking and feeling what we’re doing. They make these projective and affective stances themselves problematic, and press us to view them as a whole. In short, they step us back to the transcendental level in us.
How does authenticity handle the challenges posed by death and guilt? It doesn’t overcome or eliminate them: as authentic, I am still towards my death, and still guilty. We’ve seen that these are structural limits to projection, and authenticity can’t change that. But authenticity does two other things, and these, I think, are Heidegger’s own principal arguments in favor of it.
First, it faces these limits, is “in the truth” with respect to them—in contrast with the avoidance and flight in which we live firstly and mostly. BT g260 says that authentic being-towards-death is towards it “without either fleeing it or covering it up.” And g265: “In anticipation Dasein can first make certain of its ownmost being in its unattainable totality.” So authenticity is justified epistemically.
Second, it uses this facing of death and guilt to “make mine” its projects—in the way we will see—which is their “structurally appropriate” role, i.e. their function. So although authenticity doesn’t really “solve” either problem, it turns these limits into advantages: I become myself by my relation to them. I also become—in the way that is really appropriate to Dasein—“whole” and “complete.” Thus authenticity is also justified functionally.
Consider first authentic being-towards death, which Heidegger calls “anticipation” [Vorlaufen]. The German says “running ahead,” and what he wants us to hear is that our attention runs forward to death—not that we try to hasten it. (So it’s not a matter of “actualizing” the possibility of death [BT g261].) Above all we face death as possibility: “[T]he possibility must, unweakened, be understood as possibility, it must be cultivated as a possibility, and withstood as possibility in comportment towards it” [g261].
This facing is of course not a merely theoretical attention: anticipation doesn’t lie in a scientific knowledge or certainty that one will die. Instead, it is our projective attention that runs ahead to death—the attention with which we aim and orient ourselves in our projects. We aim these projects in relation to death, i.e. the possibility of being unable to project, of ceasing to be Dasein, a possibility that is indefinite in the sense that it “can come at any moment.” (Hence “ahead” is potentially misleading, in suggesting that the possibility lies at some distance in the future.)
Because anticipation reaches “all the way” ahead to my death—recognizing that it may even be “now”—and sees it as the bound to all my possibilities, it gives me the “wholeness” that is really appropriate to Dasein. “Since anticipation of the unattainable [unüberholbare] possibility discloses with it all the possibilities that lie before it, there lies in it the possibility of an existentiell advance grasp of the whole Dasein, i.e. the possibility to exist as a whole ability-to-be” [BT g264]. In each moment that I thus stretch out to my death, I live as the kind of whole it behooves me to be.
However, this projective attention to death is also not a matter of planning over death’s possibility—of taking practical regard of the various ways it might happen. As we’ve seen, this kind of calculating, preventative attention serves to “weaken” the possibility by its strategic management. It steps back from existing concerns to reason how to modify and pursue them in the light of death. It can then throw itself back into its concerns, and run them in the satisfaction that it has deftly handled death.
But in authentic being-towards-death we must not have it at our disposal, so as to feel that we have contained its threat and can proceed with our ordinary aims. Authenticity feels the threat precisely in those ordinary aims; this lack of insulation of death from existing concerns may be its most distinguishing feature. Authenticity faces death in these concerns, and this lets it judge these concerns from within, and not by strategic planning about death’s bearing on them. In particular, death’s indefiniteness changes the way I pursue these concerns.
Death—facing it—changes my relation to my other possibilities; it forces me to treat them too as possibilities, rather than awaiting their actualizations (taking these to be all that matters). As authentic, I aim at my projects in the practical understanding that they are each exposed to this standing threat.22 I see, about my ends in each case, that I am these ends not as outcomes achieved, but as the for-whiches of my projective effort. I am these ends as I exist (stand out) towards them. So what counts is how I have them, and especially whether and how I’ve chosen them. Death shifts my attention onto my relation to my ends, and makes salient the question whether I have made them mine. So it turns me to face issues about all of my ends that I ordinarily shirk.
This relation to death takes away my everyday satisfaction with my projects as “what one does.” Death is a possibility I have from my essential structure: the possibility of my ceasing to exist. And death is “between me and myself”: all that matters is my own effort, and the only help anyone else can give is by inducing or spurring that effort (as phenomenology aims to do). Death brings me back to self-reliance, in relation to my other ends as well; it “individualizes me down to myself” [cf. BT g263].
But by this very act of pulling me back from my sociality, into the context of myself, authenticity equips me to choose ends for myself. By testing my ends, in my very effort at them, against the possibility of death, by choosing them and shaping them in the midst of this test, I make them “mine” genuinely. “Becoming free for its own death in anticipation, liberates [Dasein] from its lostness in contingently pressing possibilities, so that it can for the first time understand and choose among the factical possibilities that lie before the unattainable [possibility, death]” [BT g264]. So authenticity involves, as he says in the culminating paragraph, “an impassioned … freedom towards death” [g266].
The other aspect of authenticity concerns our guilt; Heidegger calls it “resoluteness” [Entschlossenheit]. (The term is based in the verb entschliessen, (to) decide or resolve on.) Heidegger defines it at BT g296–97: “the reticent, anxiety-ready self-projection [Sichentwerfen] upon the ownmost being-guilty.” So resoluteness shares with anticipation the same mode of discourse, reticence, and the same basic mood or self-finding, readiness for anxiety. But these two aspects of authenticity project themselves upon different ends; they turn, as it were, in the two essential directions of Dasein, and identify themselves by these different essential poles. Just as anticipation reaches “all the way ahead” to death, so resoluteness reaches fully back to guilt.
Guilt—what conscience calls to us—is, we’ve seen, a second kind of limit on our projection: its dependence on a source it can’t control, can’t make by its aiming effort. Ultimately it is the way projection itself is only one side to our meaning: we intend things not just by coping with them, but by feeling them. So, in particular, our projective ends are only one side to who we are. We are, just as much, how we’ve been made. Authenticity can’t overcome this limit—achieve control over this meaning we have in our affectedness. Instead it consists in facing this limit, living in the light of it.
But just how will it change projection to hold in view its own dependence on thrownness? “In resoluteness the issue for Dasein is its ownmost ability-to-be, which, as thrown, can project itself only upon determinate factical possibilities” [BT g299]. I take the main point to be, to confront these possibilities—our concrete projects and aims—with the felt-insight how we’ve been thrown into caring about them. We face, thus, “the problem,” and do so in the very heart of our effort at ends. But the very step back to facing the problem puts us in position to answer it: by choosing, in this anxious recognition of their ungroundedness, certain of these possibilities, we make them our own, and indeed we begin to build our own identity out of them. Only the projects I can will while my thrownness in them strikes me this way are genuinely mine, and not das Man’s.
By choosing projects in this stance, and by being ready to choose them so again (by being ready for anxiety), I commit myself to them. I am resolute or decided, by embracing a certain identity as one I have been thrown into. I of course don’t eliminate this thrownness, or subsume it into my projection. But I overcome the threat it had posed to my projection, by using it to make my projection what it should be, my own rather than das Man’s. In this achievement guilt-authenticity involves a kind of freedom of this projective stance, just as death-authenticity did.
This freedom lies in choosing, in the moments that really grasp my thrownness, which particular projects, among the many in the social matrix I inhabit, I will commit to and identify myself by. Whereas in anticipation I choose possibilities “all the way ahead to my death,” in resoluteness I choose them “back to my guilt”—
i.e. in a full sense of my thrownness into them, of how they are imposed on me, not of my making. And again this gives me a criterion for choice among these options: can I commit myself to a given project in this spirit? When I see-feel the ungroundedness it confronts me with, can I still will it? Some projects will be unsustainable when I attempt them in this spirit.
As with authentic being-towards-death, this authentic being-guilty lets us accomplish our “mineness.” “In understanding the call [of conscience], Dasein is heedful [hörig] to its ownmost possibility of existence. It has chosen itself” [BT g287].23 I turn towards something essential to me, something altogether independent of others and das Man, in noticing my guilt. Pursuing my projects in a way that takes account of this makes this projection mine, just as does projecting in the light of death. But, semi-paradoxically, in guilt I find my projects by resolving upon ones I have from das Man.
So put, there may seem an odd weakness to Heidegger’s account of authentic guilt. The answer to the burden of thrownness seems to be too little more than just to embrace one’s heritage—that is, some part of this heritage, and interpreted some way. By choosing it, I change it from das Man’s to mine. This seems too easy an answer, which leaves it puzzling why guilt (thrownness) would have been fled in the first place. And indeed it seems all-too-many people already “embrace their heritage”—throw themselves into projects and values they pick from their group’s traditions.
Heidegger’s answer to this charge of banality must be to stress the special way (or circumstance) in which the commitment must be made. What’s hard is fully to feel the ungroundedness of a certain inherited value, yet to choose it in all seriousness. This relation to heritage will be something quite different from the usual following of tradition, which takes the embraced practices not at all as arbitrary but as singled out by virtue and reason.
Next Heidegger brings these two “kinds” of authenticity—anticipation and resoluteness—together in Chapter 3’s §62. He tries to show that they are really two aspects of a single phenomenon. They require one another; neither is really itself without the other.
Guilt-authenticity requires/entails death-authenticity for two reasons. (1) Death is one thing Dasein has been thrown into; it’s a part of our guilt. We are, as it were, guilty of being mortal. My being-towards-death is a very large “brute fact” about who I am, and I can only be authentically guilty if I face this way I’ve been thrown. (2) Really to face any part of my guilt, I must face it “unto death.” “[O]nly as anticipating does resoluteness become an originary being towards the ownmost ability-to-be of Dasein. Only when resoluteness “qualifies” itself as being-towards-death does it understand the “can” of its ability-to-be-guilty” [BT g306]. We most acutely feel who and how we are when we feel ourselves thrown towards death.
And—although Heidegger does not address this reverse implication—death-authenticity entails/requires guilt-authenticity: really to face my death, I must fully feel how I am thrown towards it, subjected to it. I must also feel how I am thrown into a social web of ideas and practices towards death, and must resolutely take up some of these in how I live with it.
So far we’ve mainly been looking at the ways authenticity regarding death and guilt will change how we project. But the authentic stance towards them also involves or engages the other two aspects of being-in, self-finding (feeling) and talk or Rede.
The authentic feeling towards death and guilt is of course anxiety. “The Befindlichkeit … that can hold open the constant and utter threat to itself arising from Dasein’s ownmost individualized being, is anxiety” [BT g265–66]. (Here Heidegger is speaking about authentic being-towards-death; the same point about authentic being-guilty is at g295–96.)
This raises the question just how authenticity “solves” the problem of anxiety, as one of the difficulties falling flees. The answer, as with death and guilt, is that it doesn’t eliminate what we flee, but shows us indeed how to live with it. Authenticity finds a way to project and strive in anxiety, overcoming its paralyzing or enervating effect.24 Indeed it learns not just how to cope with anxiety, but how to turn it to use, and to the all-important use of making my projects (genuinely) mine.
Anxiety over death and guilt is the mood in which I need to choose my projects, the test I need to put them to. And I need to put them to this test not just once, drawing a general lesson, but recurringly. Choosing my projects in this way I make them mine, and I keep them mine only by an abiding deference to that manner of choosing, a readiness to test what I’m doing by anxiety again. It is in this sense that authenticity is ready or prepared for anxiety, angstbereite [BT g297].
Our relentless drift into habit and custom—into doing things by rote or by copying—erodes every resolution. We must commit ourselves again and again, by choosing what we do out of anxiety over death and guilt. In authenticity we learn to use anxiety as an acid test for our projects: shall I still do this when I’m anxious over these? Can I still will and value this end—carry on in this role—when I’m feeling death’s constant possibility, and my humbling guilt? It’s by choosing to do so precisely then that I make a serious choice of the activity, and make it mine.
The authentic mode of talk (Rede) about guilt is “reticence” [Verschwiegenheit]. When conscience calls us guilty, we don’t “answer back”—don’t defend ourselves. Conscience calls Dasein “as [something] to become still, back into the stillness of itself. … [Reticence] takes words away from the common-sense chat of das Man” [BT g296]. And I think Heidegger would make a similar point about death (though he doesn’t): here too our authentic response is made “prior” to any way it can be put into words or communicated. Death and guilt are meant by us more deeply than all our social and linguistic meanings, and we can and must address them at this level, without the intercession of those social meanings.25
We’ve seen that Rede is closely related to das Man and falling, which together were the third problem authenticity is meant to address. How does it do so? Again, not by eliminating it—our das Manhood is built into our language and our social being. Even the authentic Dasein still means most words in senses that defer to the common use. We are constantly subtly copying our micro-aims and -actions from those around us.
My world is a vast web of ends aimed at by all the very complex projects, dispositions, abilities I have been socialized and habituated into. How can I hope to make more than tiny parts of this my own? To an extent these ends are organized hierarchically, and authentic choice will obviously try to deal with the highest or most ultimate ends. I try especially, in anxiety, to test and approve such principal ends. But this will not suddenly realign all my particular ends, since I generally have these not in the explicitness of attention and “from above,” but “in the background” and by a gradual accretion of imitative habits.
So inevitably the authentic Dasein will be only partially distinct from das Man—will stand only in some places out of the average understanding, through its individualizing choice. A tremendous amount of work of “mining” what I do must be carried out piecemeal, and there is always more of this to do—another reason that this anxious choosing needs to go on and on.
Now in all of this I have been presenting authenticity as the way of living Heidegger commends to us, offers to us to try to be. In this sense at least, I think it’s clear that Being and Time offers authenticity as a “value,” indeed as the highest or ultimate value. And I think nearly all of his readers take the idea so—despite Heidegger’s own insistence that he is not making value judgments in any part of his existential analysis.
He denies not just that authenticity is a value (or his value), but also that being authentic is a way of valuing. For he wants to stress its difference in kind from all the valuing we do within our projects. Here too he prefers to mark the step to the transcendental level by a change in term. We’ve already seen this with “intentionality”: he denies that our relation to being or world, the precondition for our intending things, is itself intentional. Similarly, all the valuing we do within our projects depends on a second-order commitment to these projects—on our caring to push these projects ahead. Authenticity is a privileged way of making (or sustaining) this commitment to particular projects: it is choosing them in that special circumstance and way.
Because Heidegger wants to change us at the “transcendental” level, and not by specifying a different aim for our projects, he denies that he is offering us a value. Authenticity is a different relation to all our projects and values, and need not give us different such projects. Nevertheless I think becoming authentic is still itself a meta-project, to which Heidegger wants us to attend more deeply or decisively than we do to our first-order projects: we’re to judge and practice the latter by reference to it. And as the aim of this meta-project, authenticity is indeed a second-order value, which has indirect authority over other values, via that acid test of anxiety.
So I suggest that Heidegger does propose authenticity as a value. And he has two main ways of defending or justifying this value to us, as we’ve already started to see.
The first is epistemic: authenticity is the condition of facing the deep structure of my projection, which we ordinarily avoid and flee. Heidegger stresses that resoluteness brings us “into the truth.” “In resoluteness we now come to the truth of Dasein which is most originary because it is authentic” [BT g297]. And “resoluteness is what first gives authentic transparency to Dasein” [g299]. Since we readers have taken on the project of phenomenology, we can be presumed to value the truth about ourselves. And we’ll see that this transparency of authenticity, the truth we have in it about ourselves, will be crucial for the way Heidegger goes on in the book’s third “wave,” which we’ll turn to in Chapter 6. I’ll return to authenticity’s epistemic role there.
Heidegger’s second justification is functional: authenticity is the proper working of Dasein’s essential structure.26 In particular, it is the fulfillment or adequate achievement of the “mineness” that lies at my crux, in the way I “go about” my own being [BT g 42]. Instead of death and guilt scaring me into losing myself in das Man, they get turned into tools to “mine” (make mine) some of the possibilities I find myself after. In authenticity I become a self. “Selfhood is only read off existentially in the authentic ability-to-be-self, i.e. in the authenticity of Dasein’s being as care” [g322].27
We achieve this mineness by exercising that second-order capacity we all have as Dasein: the capacity to choose our ends in the light of our death and guilt. I think this is what Heidegger means by his frequent expression “ownmost ability-to-be” [eigenstes Seinkönnen]. It is the ability to be authentic, though most often we fail to exercise this ability, and fall into das Man and inauthenticity.
Heidegger’s reliance on such a functional justification for authenticity—his effort to establish it by analysis of our structure—is a large-scale feature of Being and Time. But he does not address questions we may have as to why Dasein has this basic structure. On a Christian view we are of course products of God’s design, and if virtue lies in facing death and guilt, that is presumably why they are there in us. In Heidegger’s detheologized analysis it’s not clear whether death and guilt, as structural limits that yet enable us to become selves, are fortunate accidents, or somehow there in order to play this role.
The absence of an argument here is a threat to this way of justifying authenticity. For if this existential structure—projection, self-finding, talk, death, guilt, and the rest—is not a product of design, the implication that authenticity fulfills or accomplishes the proper working of this structure needs other explanation. Authenticity is not how the structure most often works, so Heidegger needs an explanation why it is how the structure should work. What sets the system that goal?
There’s a second problem with this ideal of authenticity, concerning not its justification but its content. It may well seem too self-centered an ideal. In authenticity I accomplish mineness, I become a full-fledged self—the focus is on “me” in multiple ways. My fundamental project is the utterly private one of facing my own death and guilt and choosing myself through them. I individualize myself by separating off from the group-being of das Man, and this is the main way others come up in the story—as those with whom I “chat” and share in das Man. Heidegger pays little attention to more satisfying relations to others, not to love or friendship, for example.
Besides worrying that this ideal is too isolating, we might complain that it offers no ethics—no rules or guidance for how to treat others. Couldn’t one be authentic, and yet any kind of terror to others, simply by choosing that terrible behavior in the light of one’s death and guilt? Doesn’t this follow from the second-order status of authenticity? Or does Heidegger think there is any way that authenticity will bring us to care about others?
Heidegger makes only infrequent mention of how authenticity will affect my relations to others.28 The principal suggestion is that it enables me to care that others be authentic as well—this being their genuine good:
Resoluteness to itself first brings Dasein into the possibility of letting the others with it “be” in their ownmost ability-to-be, and to co-disclose this [ability] in the solicitude that leaps forth and liberates. The resolute Dasein can become the “conscience” of others. From the authentic being-oneself of resoluteness there first arises the authentic with-one-another.
[BT g298]
My authenticity reveals my essential task of achieving mineness by facing death and guilt. This self-understanding allows me to see that others likewise are defined by this task, and not by the concrete roles with which I mostly identify them. Understanding them as Dasein, my concern towards them shifts to this essential aspect.29
This argument’s main thrust is towards caring about others’ authenticity in preference to their contingent ends; when we see what’s essential to them, we’ll see that authenticity is what most matters. But there’s the more basic question why we should care about others at all. Heidegger’s general idea seems to be that I should care about others appropriately to the kind of entities they are: they are not to-hand equipment, but Dasein, and hence endprojectors themselves.30 I should not just view but treat others as having ends, and this involves somehow—in a way and for reasons Heidegger doesn’t say—caring about those ends myself.
But above all, as the above quotation shows, when I’m authentic I care especially about others’ essential end, which is to become authentic themselves. So I become their “conscience,” i.e. some kind of impetus or inducement to face the basic choice of themselves, in awareness of death and guilt. Heidegger’s stress on this angle of concern towards others, and his inattention to any interest in their physical well-being, may not give us enough of what we think an ethics should.
Still, although Heidegger seldom mentions authenticity’s aim to help others to authenticity, much less motivates or justifies it, I think the idea plays a hidden but framing role in Being and Time. The book itself is Heidegger’s effort to “become the conscience” of his readers: to remind us of our death and guilt, and spur us to the personal effort over them that would make us authentic. His phenomenology, as a communication, has the purpose of bringing others to authenticity, since only here do they genuinely understand themselves as Dasein.
Authenticity is the end of the story told in Heidegger’s “existentialism.” It’s the appropriate accomplishment of the “mineness” that lies at the root of us—the way our intentionality is crucially reflexive (we are an issue for ourselves). In authenticity we accomplish that reflexivity, by grasping, feeling, and wording in relation to our own, essential selves, the selves with the transcendental ability to choose projects not as das Man, but in the individuating experience of anxiety over death and guilt.
The comparison with Nietzsche may be helpful. He too puts great weight on a choice of one’s projects (or values), but specifies very differently the circumstances in which this choice must be made to be validating. For Nietzsche I think it is genealogy, and the insight this gives into the drives that designed these values. Unless we understand what these values were designed for, we can’t judge their suitability for us. By this genealogical truth about how our values were made, we get the kind of control over them that counts; we win a Nietzschean freedom. So Nietzsche’s focus is on empirical insights about the psychological and historical roots of our moral values.31
Heidegger gives no such role to genealogy. The right way to choose is not with any such empirical insight, but out of an anxious engagement with death and guilt. We touch, as it were, the essential in us, and that gives our choice the power to render the projects we choose our own. We needn’t, it seems, know anything in particular about those projects. To be sure, when we judge whether we can live a project “unto death and guilt” we will notice any laziness or banality in the project, as what can’t be so lived. But this recognition comes in the intuitions we’ve seen Heidegger so stresses—not the naturalistic study I think Nietzsche favors.
This point of contact with Nietzsche—the idea that we need to choose a certain way if we’re to become ourselves—is the crux to the “existential” strand I’ve been unfolding from Being and Time. We’ve seen that Heidegger himself has special uses for the term “existence,” such that “existential” means something different in that book. And he will later deny that Being and Time intended an existentialism. As I will try to show, however, he well knew the book’s affinities with the existential point in Nietzsche—and later turned deliberately against them. He recognized the affinity between authenticity and that Nietzschean freedom, and will give them the same diagnosis/critique: they express the controlling and “framing” will that Heidegger associates with technology. But this is work for a later chapter.
Summary
The second level of structure emerges as we pay attention to what our intentionality shows itself trying to hide. We find here Being and Time’s existential story: an abstract human drama that is in its main lines Kierkegaardian, though Heidegger gives it canonical statement. Beneath our pragmatic directedness we pursue a more essential project, for each of us the same. We are tasked with the need to realize and achieve our particular “mineness,” to become our own self, no longer submerged in the collective das Man.
The drama arises because this task is so difficult that we avoid it—and this is the beginning of that existential story. Study shows that our everydayness is characterized by “falling,” in particular into das Man. Heidegger introduces these ideas with clear valuative force, yet while insisting he’s not making any moral judgments, only analyzing our structure. What’s essential to us is the need to mean things from the practice, “as one means” the words we use. We go wrong in letting this aspect overwhelm the ways we mean in our aiming and feeling. We have a motive to go wrong this way: it’s a tactic for fleeing or avoiding a distressing condition we’re prone to.
Phenomenology next diagnoses this condition that falling flees: anxiety. Unlike fear, which concerns threats internal to our particular projects, anxiety is a disengagement from all such projects, an alienation that wishes it could care about them. It is a “global breakdown” in which these projects are “lit up,” as well as their contingency: we are not compelled to them, but either choose them or fall into them. And this is what anxiety is anxious about: facing this need to choose its projects, and to choose them in the way that makes them our own and not das Man’s. And this is hard, because this choice must be “in the face of” certain deep problems in our structure.
This brings us to the root of the problem: we achieve mineness only by choosing our projects “in the light of” these structural limits. There are no aims that are settled already as ours, nor picked out by reason for us. Instead it all hangs on how we engage in our projects: whether we pursue them “unto death,” and in the guilt of our thrownness. These existential limits are touchstones that test our aims. Can I will it while feelingly aware of death as certain but indefinite? Can I will it while also aware how I’ve been thrown into it? Authenticity, the happy ending of the existential drama, is available to any of us. It lies in anticipation (properly facing death) plus resoluteness (properly facing guilt)—though really these are not independent but require one another. In anticipating death I recognize it as possibility, and this changes my relation to my aims or goals—I pursue them as possibilities too, rather than awaiting them as future actualities. And in resoluteness over guilt I choose my heritage while recognizing its contingency—the impossibility of making or justifying myself “from the ground up.” Heidegger promotes authenticity to us on both epistemic and functional grounds: we best understand ourselves in it, and we also realize our essence by achieving the mineness at our crux.
Further reading
The existential ideas of BT can be profitably explored back to Kierkegaard (e.g. in The Sickness unto Death) and ahead to Sartre (especially in Being and Nothingness).