Being And Time: Authentic Self

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In the last post, I surveyed fallenness, and its threefold structure of average everydayness (ambiguity, curiosity, and idle talk). For Heidegger, this is the typical way in which we are in the world. We become entangled in that world and live away from ourselves to take on a “they-self” of the others.

In this post, I turn to authenticity. Here again Heidegger identifies another threefold structure. These three, that I’ll group under disclosedness, are attunement, understanding, and discourse. They can be seen as counterparts to the threefold structure of fallenness:

Fallenness	Disclosedness
Ambiguity	Attunement [Befindlichkeit]
Curiosity	Understanding [Verstehen]
Idle Talk	Discourse/Speech [Rede]

For Heidegger, to be authentic is to act for ourselves given the possibilities of being that lie before us. This does not mean to take a good long look in the mirror. For Heidegger, authenticity is not a psychological change in perspective. It is seeing clearly and taking action. Not action just for the sake of doing something. But action that makes a decision to choose for the self from among our own possibilities rather than picking up the easy options that the world offers us.

Heidegger thinks it is difficult to go through life and encounter those moments when we disclose our being to ourselves. Dasein, our “being there,” is usually hidden from us in plain sight. Just like with other innerworldly beings, at different times our being is both veiled and disclosed – absent and present. And as previously discussed, we are also “thrown” into the world. This primordial thrownness is prior to any rational or conscious realization that we are there. Our being is “there” and not “here” – or as Heidegger says “delivered over” to the world (135).

We do not directly experience our thrownness. Ironically, Heidegger asserts that we become most aware of it when we turn away from the world. What brings our being-there into awareness? Mood. Or rather being in a mood [Stimmung]. By “mood” Heidegger does not mean the type of ordinary mental observations such as when we say, “I’m in a good mood today.”

Mood is something deeper and serves as a sort of barometer for how we feel we are in the world. “Mood makes manifest ‘how one is and is coming along.’ In this ‘how one is’ being in a mood brings being to its ‘there'” (134).  When Heidegger uses the term “mood” he means to describe this more fundamental component of our being. We are always in a mood whether we realize it or not. When we sit up and take notice of our moods, Heidegger calls this attunement [Befindlichkeit]:

“Mood does not disclose in the mode of looking at thrownness, but as turning toward and away from it. For the most part, mood does not turn itself toward the burdensome character of Dasein manifest in it, it does this least of all in an elevated mood in which this burden is lifted. This turning away is always what it is in the mode of attunement” (135).

Moods break our equanimity. They disrupt the status quo. They stir us from the slumber of everydayness and the tranquil way in which we are a “they-self” for others. When we are attuned to a mood this attunement is a pre-conscious, ontological mode of being that “turns away” in order to see our being. “Attunement is an existential, fundamental way in which Dasein is its there” (139). At the same time, it reveals our thrownness into the world.

One very powerful mode of attunement is fear. Fear is always being afraid of something. It can be a threat like a wild animal. Or a sudden sound in the night. But there is another related mood in which there is no definable threat and yet we feel profound unsettledness when we experience it. That mood is anxiety [Angst]. When we are anxious, we do not know why we are anxious. We do not know the cause of our anxiety. Heidegger suggests “that about which anxiety is anxious is being-in-the-world itself” (187). Anxiety is a curious mood that seems to take us out of our average everydayness. We might have a vague sense of unease. Or a sudden feeling that nothing matters, or that the world seems suddenly meaningless:

“In anxiety, the things at hand in the surrounding world sink away, and so do innerworldly beings in general. The ‘world’ can offer nothing more, nor can the Dasein-with of others. Thus anxiety takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, falling prey, in terms of the ‘world’ and the public way of being interpreted” (187).

It sounds pretty bleak, but for Heidegger this is a good thing. Anxiety removes our identification with the they-self. We become momentarily individualized as the mood of anxiety separates us from being with others in the world. It’s an opportunity to pull back from the “entangled” average everydayness that keeps us busy in order to reveal to us a certain “uncanny” feeling of freedom. We are free to become. To choose for ourselves from among our possibilities of being. Anxiety has a way of showing us to ourselves without being filtered through social norms that tend to distract us.

“In anxiety there lies the possibility of a distinctive disclosure, since anxiety individualizes. This individuality fetches Dasein back from its falling prey and reveals to it authenticity and inauthenticity as possibilities of its being. The fundamental possibilities of Dasein, which are always my own, show themselves in anxiety as they are, undisguised by innerworldly beings to which Dasein, initially and for the most part, clings” (191).

I have a personal anecdote that might make this clearer. When I was young, I had a job that required a substantial commute by car. Every morning, I drove with thousands of others on a freeway that became a bumper-to-bumper crawl. It would take over an hour to get to work. And then I’d repeat the experience on the way home that night. Did I think about what was going on? Vaguely. I got irritated from time to time, but for the most part I gave it very little thought. This was just “what one does” as an adult. On one particular and routine day we all came to a halt for several minutes. I found myself looking fully to my left. The person in that car was staring straight ahead. I looked to my right and saw another doing the same. I looked in my rear-view mirror and all around me were stony-faced people sitting motionless in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead. An eerie feeling came over me. It was a moment of clarity, or as Heidegger would say, it was a disclosure showing me in my thrownness that for which I felt anxiety. What am I doing? Is this all there is?

The mood of anxiety calls us back to ourselves. But it doesn’t have anything to say. It is little more than a brief uncanny interruption that alerts us to the fact that something is not quite right. Like it wants us to stop what we’re doing and take a look. Take a look at what? At the crossroads where the authentic and inauthentic possibilities of our being present themselves.

The second part of authentic existence is what Heidegger calls understanding [Verstehen]. It’s common in ordinary language for us to say things like “I get what you’re saying” or “I understand what it is you need me to do.” But this is Heidegger so of course ordinary uses of the word “understanding” is not what he means here. Just like with other technical terms, understanding is an ontological or existential part of Dasein’s being.

Where mood and attunement are the interruption of a routinized existence, understanding is the realization of our potentiality of being. At every moment we can choose a different way to be. Our understanding then is “being possible,” which is to say, out of the possibilities and choices that are always in front of us we consciously pick one over the others. Through our understanding we are “the possibility of being free for [our] ownmost potentiality of being” (144). As possibilities are chosen, we disclose to ourselves our being. Your mother likely told you at some point “you are what you eat.” Ontologically speaking, you are what you choose. When anxiety calls, will we choose authentically for ourselves? Or is anxiety so uncomfortable, and the burden of our existence so heavy, that we instead flee back to the welcome embrace of the others?

Needless to say, Heidegger’s not talking about choosing between vanilla or chocolate. He means projecting yourself into a self for the sake of which you want to be in the world:

“[Dasein] is existentially that which is not yet in its potentiality of being, understanding, and its character of project, only because it is what it becomes or does not become, can it say understandingly to itself: ‘become what you are!” (145).

In the margins of his copy of the book, Heidegger later made this enigmatic comment: “But who are ‘you’? The one who let’s go – and becomes.”

Remember that first premise I quoted at the beginning? “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (42). This has all been a deep dive into the structures of our being to explain that premise. Simply put, Heidegger is saying that who we are – our being – is not spirit, soul, or consciousness. It is not something immutable that remains fixed throughout life. We are not doomed by Fate to propel toward a preordained outcome. Instead, who we are is a recognition of the potentiality of our being, the possibilities that we choose, and the sum total of those choices.

Heidegger believes that in our everyday lives we are entangled in the world in such a way that for the most part we fail to see or choose our possibilities. We close ourselves off from authenticity. But at the same time, we are concerned about how things are going and how we are doing in the world. We are invested (absorbed) in the various careers, projects and tasks that we undertake. In short, we care. And not just about our thrown being but especially about the potentiality of our being and what we can do with the time we have.

Dasein “projects its being upon [and toward] possibilities” (148). But this movement on our part is not serendipity or some kind of amble down a path in random directions. In our understanding we interpret our potentiality and being is disclosed to us as something meaningful. “All interpretation is grounded in understanding” (154).

Heidegger then walks through a dense thicket of some derivative grammatical structures: interpretation, statements, communication, the Greek idea of λόγος (logos) and language [Sprache]. Finally, he concludes that “the existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse [Rede]” (160).

Discourse is the third leg of the stool for authentic being. It exists alongside (or in Heidegger’s technical term “equiprimordially”) with attunement and understanding. Unlike the meaninglessness of idle talk, discourse makes intelligible and articulates what is known in the interpretation given by understanding. I found this section very pedantic unfortunately. It’s even more obscure than earlier sections if that can be believed. The bottom line is Heidegger is looking for a way to ground meaningful discourse in our ontological being rather than in ordinary language, higher order logic, or reason. It is a pattern with Heidegger throughout the book. There is always something primordial, something ontological, something deep, that lies beneath and grounds what is seen on the surface.

Heidegger calls the threefold of attunement, understanding, and discourse the “being of disclosedness” (180) and this is contrasted with the threefold of idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. For Heidegger, only when we turn away from the they-self and disclose ourselves to ourselves can we be authentic. In his unique jargon, that only a philosopher could love, Heidegger summarizes the existential analytic thusly:

“On the basis of the attunement essentially belonging to it, Dasein has a mode of being in which it is brought before itself and it is disclosed to itself in its thrownness. But thrownness is the mode of being of a being which always is itself its possibilities in such a way that it understands itself in them and in terms of them (projects itself upon them). Being-in-the-world, to which being together with things at hand belongs just as primordially as being-with others, is always for the sake of itself…. The average everydayness of Dasein can thus be determined as entangled-disclosed, thrown-projecting being-in-the-world, which is concerned with its ownmost potentially in its being together with the ‘world’ and in being-with with others” (181).

Let me try to unpack the jargon here. We are always in a mood. The mood of anxiety is important because we are attuned to it. If we listen, if we set aside our routinized existence, attunement calls attention to our anxiety. Our understanding then provides the means by which we can see ourselves as a mode of being that is its possibilities. We are concerned about our being. We care about those possibilities that lie before us. Discourse is a way for us to articulate that understanding in order to act on our possibilities for the sake of which we become who we are. This is us choosing authentically for our true self.

The alternative approach is for us to succumb to anxiety. It makes us deeply uncomfortable, and we want to push it away. Heidegger says our being becomes a “burden” for us. We flee from it and back into the they-self that others offer to us. We don’t have to make difficult choices because the world provides templates for living that are easy to pick up and adopt as our own. This is us choosing inauthentically.

We now take another turn on the hermeneutic circle. Heidegger will conclude that our being is care. I’ll take that up in the next post.

Next Post in Series: Care