Man and World24:119-142, 1991. 9 1991 KluwerAcademicPublishers. Printedin the Netherlands.

A Kierkegaardian critique of Heidegger's concept of authenticity DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND Department of Philosophy, Bard College, Anandale-on-Itudson, N Y 12504

1. Introduction: Two problems and two suggestions One of the central issues of Heidegger's Being and Time is the question of the relation between authentic and inauthentic being, the two basic possibilities of existence for Dasein. Given the notoriously obscure and enigmatic character of Being and Time, it is not surprising that there has been much disagreement among commentators about how best to decipher Heidegger's account of this isssue. But nearly all commentators are in agreement in recognizing two very general problems which come to view in the analysis of authenticity and inauthenticity. First, it is felt that the distinction between these two ways of being tends to become obscure, due to a basic ambiguity in Heidegger's analysis. On the one hand, Heidegger insists that authentic Dasein is not cut off from its everyday being-in-theworld: "authentic existence," he writes, "is not something which floats above falling everydayness. ''1 But on the other hand, notwithstanding Heidegger's claim to be presenting a completely neutral, non-perjorative phenomenology of Dasein's everyday world (see, e.g., H167), virtually all commentators conclude that he tends to fall into equating the everyday with inauthentic being. As Michael Theunissen puts it, "[Everydayness is] projected originally and to all appearances as indifferent with respect to authenticity and inauthenticity, ... [but] in the further course of the investigation, everydayness melts more and more into inauthenticity. In most places, Heidegger uses the concepts 'everyday' and 'inauthentic' as meaning the same. ''2 This collapse of the everyday into inauthenticity, despite HeideggeFs stated intentions, occurs due to the fact that everyday reality is characterized by a persistent tendency on the part of Dasein to flee from itself, to conceal its authentic possibilities from itself, and, in short, to be lost to itself. In its everyday reality, "Dasein has in every case already gone astray and failed to recognize itself" (H144). Given that authentic being is not

120 "detached" from the everyday, and that Heidegger's account of the everyday tends to blend into an account of inauthenticity, there appears to be a real problem as to how authenticity may be distinguished from the inauthentic. The second general problem is this: even if we could overcome the first difficulty by finding a clear distinction between authentic and inauthentic being, Heidegger's account of authenticity is widely felt to be extraordinarily abstract and formal. Heidegger insists that authentic being first makes possible concrete choice within the determinate social situations of life. Hence, for example, the authentic call of conscience "does not hold before us some empty ideal of existence, but calls us forth into the Situation" (H300). And yet his actual phenomenology of authenticity (specifically, his account of anxiety, being-towards-death, guilt, resoluteness, and conscience) appears to abstract away from the conditions for concrete choice. As Karsten Harries writes: Like 'guilt' and 'conscience,' 'resolve' is left empty and abstract. Heidegger's call to resolve calls man to a form of life, not to a particular life. But man cannot exist as pure form . . . . The ontological analysis of authenticity and resolve remains incomplete until it has been shown how such [particular, concrete] decisions are possible.~ In this article, I wish to think through these two problems with the help of two suggestions, the first having to do with a certain way of situating these problems within a common framework, and the second proposing a way of resolving them. My first suggestion is that light may be shed on both of these problems if we view them as having a shared origin in a recurring dilemma which emerges in Heidegger's Being and Time, centering on the ambiguous interplay between the concepts of Dasein's absorption in the world and its dislocation from the world. Dasein's everyday existence is characterized by "its absorption in the 'world' of its concern" (H184), an "enthrallment" and "fascination" and "entanglement" with the affairs of its immediate environment. And yet as Heidegger moves towards his analysis of the possibility of authentic existence, it becomes clear that this possibility depends upon a perspective from which Dasein can "break away" or "distance" itself or "dislocate" itself from its absorption in its everyday way of being. Hence all of the crucial ontological-existential structures of authenticity - anxiety, being-towards-death, guilt, resoluteness, conscience involve a dislocation from absorption. To cite but one example, Heidegger writes that in anxiety, the mood in which Dasein's potentiality-forauthenticity is disclosed, "the world has the character of completely lacking significance;.., the 'world' can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of Others" (H186, 187).

-

121 My second suggestion is for a way of rethinking the duality of absorption and dislocation which might help to alleviate the double problem of Heidegger's phenomenology of authenticity and inauthenticity. What is needed is a way to allow authenticity the contextuality and concretion necessary to avoid an overly abstract and empty account of resolute choice, while at the same time providing an adequate principle of differentiation between authentic and inauthentic existence. I believe that Heidegger missed an opportunity for just such a solution in his reading of a predecessor whom he partly appropriates and yet finally seeks to distance himself from. The predecessor I have in mind is Scren Kierkegaard, whose portrayal of authenticity as "resoluteness" clearly impressed and influenced Heidegger, although he found Kierkegaard's account to be overly oriented towards theology, psychology, and Hegelian ontology to serve as a reliable guide for his own fundamental ontology of authentic being.4 I believe, however, that Heidegger abandoned Kierkegaard too quickly, and specifically, that he might have avoided the problems of his account of authenticity if he had given more attention to Kierkegaard's analysis of the aesthetic "model" of "sphere" of existence. For it is just here that I find a promising clue for the discovery of a phenomenology of Dasein which might both provide the concretion so lacking in Heidegger's representation of authenticity while allowing for a more well defined line of demarcation between authentic and inauthentic being. In the next two sections of the article I will further flesh out the two problems which are implicit in Heidegger's phenomenology of authentic and inauthentic existence, showing how each may be understood as resulting from the unreconciled tension in Being and Time between the competing claims of Dasein's absorption in and dislocation from its world. I will then turn, in the final section, to my proposal for a way of resolving these problems according to the hint offered in Kierkegaard's analysis of the aesthetic sphere of life.

2. The obscurity of the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity While allowing for the important differences between the approach of Heidegger's fundamental ontology and the contrasting approaches of such existentialist writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre to the question of authentic existence, it is nevertheless helpful to see Heidegger's project as sharing several important features with the traditional question in existentialism of the nature of the self and its prospects for self-realization. For despite Heidegger's criticism of the typical formula of existentialism

122 that "existence precedes essence,''5 he shares the basic existentialist definition of Dasein as transcendence. In his Vom Wesen des Grundes (published in 1929, two years after Being and Time) Heidegger describes transcendence as the basic constitution of Dasein, 6 and in Being and Time he defines Dasein's existence as potentiality-for-Being, the projection of possibilities of itself into the future. Dasein is delivered over to its Zu-sein its to-be - which means that its Being is a task rather than a simple "isness," a motion towards its possibilities rather than a static self-identity. The self is a "perpetual striving," as Kierkegaard puts it,7 or in Sartre's words, a constant "self-surpassing, ''8 or as Nietzsche says, a Selbstgiberwindung and Selbstaufhebung, a self-overcoming and selftranscendence.9 Dasein as transcendence is a constant upsurge into the future, a recurring process of becoming, delivering us over to the responsibility of continual self-invention and creative metamorphosis. Given this definition of the self, a problem arises as to how the self can ever coincide with or possess itself, since it is perpetually beyond itself. As Sartre says, "l'homme est constamment hors de lui-m8me: c'est en se projetant et en se perdant hors de lui qu'il fait exister l'homme. ''1~ And in his Being and Nothingness, Sarte writes that the being of consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question. This means that the being of consciousness does not coincide with itself in a full equivalence . . . . In its coming into existence human reality grasps itself as an incomplete being . . . . Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is never given. 11 Similarly, Kierkegaard remarks in his Postscript on the attitude of the inauthentic self that it would be sheer waste of time "to strive to become what one already is," that is, a self; "but for this very reason alone it is a very difficult task, the most difficult of all tasks in fact," since one cannot simply be a self, but must perpetually become, which means that we are constantly beyond ourselves. 12 Thus in his Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard defines despair as the paradox of neither being able to escape the self nor to possess it: despair is the "disrelationship" of the self to itself, the "agonizing contradiction" that we can neither become nothing nor find the way "wholly to be oneself. ''13 For Heidegger no less than Sartre and Kierkegaard, Dasein's being is such that it places itself in question: precisely because, as transcendence, "in each case Dasein is already ahead of itself" and "beyond itself," Dasein is "an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue" (H191). Similarly, Dasein's existential character of transcendence is just what constitutes its "guilt," which is "never to have power over one's ownmost Being from the ground up" (H284). Heidegger often alludes to the problem

123 of how Dasein is ever to coincide with itself, or achieve a self-totality (a "being-as-a-whole") since, as Michael Zimmerman puts it, "as potentialityfor-Being [Dasein is] never complete but always in the process of becoming. ''14 In an important passage occurring at the beginning of the second main Division of Being and Time, Heidegger addresses this question directly: If existence is definitive for Dasein's Being and if its essence is constituted in part by potentiality-for-Being, then, as long as Dasein exists, it must in each case, as such a potentiality, not yet be something. Any entity whose Essence is made up of existence, is essentially opposed to the possibility of our getting it in our grasp as an entity which is a whole (H232f). 15 The shared problem being addressed by these writers is the question of how the self may achieve authenticity. Authentic being is defined by Heidegger as self-possession 16 and self-unification. 17 While the authentic self possesses itself, or has "taken hold" of itself (H129), in the sense of appropriating (zueignen, aneignen - to make one's own) those possibilities it projects in its resolve, the inauthentic self has closed off, concealed, and turned away from these possibilities, and thus has "the character of Beinglost" (H175). Similarly, authentic existence entails a unification of the self, a grounding of itself in choices it has resolved upon in its own freedom, while the inauthentic self is disunited or "dispersed" or "disconnected" (see e.g. H129, H390), a "completely groundless" existence, "uprooted" from its potentiality for authenticity, "floating unattached" from any genuine commitments (H170), distracted from the responsibility of choosing for itself. Inauthentic being is a fleeing in the face of itself, and delivers itself over to the public 'They' world of superficial understanding and self-neglect, where all possibilities for choice and action have always already been decided upon by the anonymous Other. The "dictatorship" of the 'They' takes away all self-decisiveness and self-responsibility from the individual, "disburdening" Dasein from the task of self-discovery, tranquillizing and levelling the self down to an all-too-easy, all-too-idle accommodation and solution to its burden of becoming an authentic, self-unified, autonomous individual. The scene of our inauthentic life is thus a scenery of selfestrangement: "everyone is the other, and no one is himself" (H128). The challenge faced by Dasein is how to overcome the estrangement and dispersion of its inauthentic existence so as to achieve the self-possession and self-unification of authenticity. As I have suggested, this problem is made particularly acute for Heidegger due to his claim that authenticity is not detached from the everyday, and yet his tendency to identify the everyday with inauthentic being. Dasein is zundchst und zumeist, "first of

124 all and for the most part," fallen into an absorption in the everyday world. Even more strongly, Heidegger says of Dasein's everydayness that "out of this kind of Being - and back into it again - is all existing" (H43, emphasis added). This means, as Zimmerman points out very clearly, that everydayness, "our usual tendency to conceal things, to regard them superficially . . . . is intrinsic to us; it cannot be escaped. ''18 Alberto Rosales makes the same point when he says that "nicht nur das uneigentlich Existierende ist alltgiglich; Alltgiglichkeit ist eine Struktur alles Existierens .... ,, 19 We cannot ~ e authentic exis.tence as a removed, purified, isolated self living above and beyond its everyday world, without at once making it into a fantastic being - much like Kierkegaard's and Marx's characterization of the Hegelian subject as a "pure abstraction." We have already seen Heidegger writing that "authentic existence is not something which floats above falling everydayness," and we may add his equally strong statement that "authentic Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the 'they'..." (H130). Given this persistent refusal on Heidegger's part to detach authenticity from the context of the everyday 'They' world, we must recognize a real dilemma at the heart of Being and Time as to how the authentic self is to be adequately distinguished from the inauthentic self. At times, Heidegger seems to try to circumvent this problem by simply disassociating authenticity from everydayness: "the Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic self' (H129). 2~ Heidegger's motivation for this dissociation is clear enough, for he wants a way to dislocate Dasein from its absorption in its inauthentic everydayness so as to provide the horizon for Dasein's potentiality-for-authenticity. And yet his account is fundamentally ambiguous, for he is tom between this desideratum and an equally strong desire not to cut authentic Dasein off from the concrete situation of its being-in-the-world of its everyday environment. Hence we find the following very strong statement: This everyday way in which things have been interpreted is one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance, with never a possibility of extrication. In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting, and communicating, all re-discovering and appropriating anew, are performed. In no case is a Dasein, untouched and unseduced by this way in which things have been interpreted, set before the open country of a 'world-in-itself' so that it just beholds what it encounters (H169). Since we can never entirely "extricate" ourselves from our everyday world, "out of which and back into which is all existing," it seems that however authentic being is to be defined, it cannot he seen as radically

125 removed from the temptation to evasion, concealment, and forgetfulness which characterizes the everyday. Our "thrownness" into the world means that "as long as [Dasein] is what it is, Dasein remains in the throw, and is sucked into the turbulence of the 'they's' inauthenticity'" (H179). Authenticity cannot be a final, "pure" state of being, then, an ultimate salvation from inauthenticity, but should perhaps been seen as a struggle with the inescapable tendency to concealment and flight which are part of our destiny as creatures fallen into the world. 21 This view would make Heidegger's anatomy of authentic existence much like Kierkegaard's view of faith, which cannot be seen as a final victory over temptation (Anfechtung), a "leap" which is made once and for all, an eternal deliverance from the suffering of existence. On the contrary, faith requires a constant repetition, an "infinite effort," since the leap "is only momentary" and does not "emancipate [us] from telluric conditions," that is, from the gravitational force of our earthly lives, our absorption in the finite world. 22 This view of authenticity as the struggle with inauthenticity seems promising, and helps to mitigate the problem of the obscurity between the concepts of authentic and inauthentic existence - not, it is true, by showing the obscurity to be only apparent, but rather by insisting that it is an unavoidable circumstance of Dasein's being. But this is not enough, for we still need a clearer picture of authenticity, and most specifically, we need to understand more fully what Heidegger means by the dislocation of Dasein from its absorption, which he insists is a necessary condition for achieving authenticity, and how this dislocation is to lead to a return to the everyday world. 3. The nature of dislocation and the abstract character of authenticity

The general phenomenon of dislocation is described by Heidegger as a distancing and decentering of the self from its absorption in the world of the everyday. This movement of dislocation is essential for authenticity, and yet we need some way to recover a transformed significance of the everyday, so that we do not "float above" the world in an empty abstraction from it. However, as we turn now to look more closely at Heidegger's anatomy of the structures of authentic being - most notably, anxiety, beingtowards-death, conscience, and resoluteness - we will see that his account is in fact very formal and abstract indeed. This poses a real question for how we are to envision the possibility of a reintegration of the dislocated standpoint of authenticity back into the everyday world. There seems to be, as Ernst Tugendhat suggests, "ein unvermittelter Sprung" and a "missing link" between the overly abstract portrait of authenticity and the call to recover a concrete grounding in the world of praxis. 23

126 Anxiety is that mood which "brings Dasein face to face with its Beingfree for ... the authenticity of its Being" (H188). Unlike fear, which is always directed towards and centered on some particular entity in the world, "that in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite; ... what threatens is nowhere; ... what oppresses us is not this or that . . . . [but rather] it is the world itself" (H186f). Anxiety, then, de-centers what is definite in the centered mood 'of fear and cuts through our absorption: it "brings [Dasein] back from its absorption in the 'world,'" so that "everyday familiarity collapses" (H189). In the "uncanniness" of this indefiniteness, where we are haunted by the sense of "'not-being-at-home" (H188), Dasein is able to catch sight of its authentic potentiality-for-being. In the uncanniness of anxiety, Dasein's "at-homeness" in the everyday world is persistently threatened by the "more primordial phenomenon" of Dasein's fundamental "not-at-home." The dislocational aspect of anxiety's decentering tendency can be seen clearly in Heidegger's dictum that "fear is anxiety fallen into the 'world,' inauthentic, and, as such, hidden from itself" (H189). The very language positions anxiety figuratively as somehow above the world, and discloses Dasein as not-at-home in the world. At the same time - and here is the ambiguity - Heidegger is adamant to defend anxiety against any characterization of "floating unattached." Again, this is because he is unwilling to abandon his basic commitment to Dasein's constitution as being-in-theworld. In its dislocation, Dasein has lost its "home" and can find no significance in its being-with-others, but Heidegger cannot share the Kierkegaardian or Nietzschean exaltation of isolation. The isolation inherent in dislocation - what Harries calls the temptation to "transform the authentic individual into a homeless stranger, ''24 and Habermas refers to as "Heidegger's methodological solipsism, ''25 and what Heidegger himself refers to as the "existential 'solipsism'" entailed by the radical individualization of authenticity (H188) - is seen as a necessary precondition for authenticity, but not an end in itself. We must experience being "not-athome" in the world, but we must eventually return to the world. The problem, however, is how such a return is possible, how the "stranger" may reclaim its home, given the disillusioning portrait Heidegger draws of our absorption in the everyday world. This problem is further intensified when we reflect on how entirely formal, how fully indefinite and unfocused, the individuating tendency of anxiety is. While Heidegger scorns everydayness as a "groundlessness" of "floating unattached," anxiety itself is not grounded in any concretion. Heidegger is untiring in his criticism of what he sees as the traditional philosophic concept of the self as a worldless subject, the Cartesian subjectum set over against a world which is essentially external and

127 extrinsic to it. 26 And yet it is hard not to see his own account of authentic existence as initiating a parallel abstraction of the self. As Theunissen writes, "Heidegger abstracts from what is, phenomenologically speaking, the truly fundamental I, the 'concrete' ego; ... he withholds from the I that fullness that arises out of its habitual world relatedness. ''27 The individualization of the self in anxiety occurs within a completely indefinite and formal context, and while anxiety is meant to constitute Dasein as Being-in-the-world, it is precisely that mood in which "the 'world' can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of others; anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the 'world'" (H187). The existential significance of dislocation is closely tied to the feature of individualization, and the corresponding idea of the "non-relationality" (Unbeziiglichkeit) of the self to others. This is seen clearly in anxiety, and is recapitulated in Heidegger's account of Being-towards-death, a way of being in which Dasein confronts its thrownness and facticity, and "wrenches" itself away from the 'they' so as to understand its "ownmost" potentiality-for-Being. In this "wrenching away" from others Dasein is utterly alone. As with anxiety, Heidegger insists that the individuating character of being-towards-death is meant to allow for an authentic beingwith-others, as opposed to the inauthentic being-with which is entailed by our absorption in the 'they.' And yet this seems to be a purely formal derivation of being-with-others, given that in our authentic confrontation with death, "all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone" (H250): "when Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern - that is, at the same time, in its Being-with towards Others - it is not itself" (H125). As Theunissen points out, "the aloneness that arises in view of this nonrelatedness [to others] is the prime fact of the authentic being of the self. ''28 The question thus arises as to how the character of authentic Dasein as a "solus ipse" - a solipsistically disclosed s e l f - is capable of "bring[ing] it face to face with itself as Being-in-the-world" (H188). It is abundantly clear that this is what Heidegger intends, but it is not at all clear how this intention is to be made concrete. It is in the "call of conscience" (der Gewissensruf) that Heidegger finds Dasein's attestation of the potential authenticity which has been disclosed in being-towards-death. Conscience is a call, an appeal, a summons to Dasein to hear itself. The "who" of the caller is t h e same as the called Dasein itself, in its uttermost anxiety, but as wholly indefinite, utterly notat-home, calling from the "nothing" and "nowhere" of silence and uncanniness (H277ff). Nothing is said, but in the "cold assurance" of the uncanny, "Dasein has been individualized down to itself" (H277). But this individualization, we must note, is again entirely formal in the

128 uncompromising indefiniteness of conscience, and the relation to being-inthe-world and being-with-others is equally problematic: in the utter "forsakenness" of Dasein's abandonment to itself, Dasein is alone (H277). If we cannot hear any concretely determined possibilities for authentic decision in the completely silent call of conscience - if indeed we literally hear nothing at all - the path towards a reintegration into the world seems in peril. Finally, "resoluteness" (der Entschluss) is defined as a "reticent selfprojection upon one's ownmost being-guilty" in anxiety (H296f), and it is here, in resoluteness, that we have "arrived at that truth of Dasein which is most primordial because it is authentic" (H297). This truth is revealed in Dasein's bringing itself into a concrete, particular "Situation" (H300), through "repetition" (die Wiederholung). In resoluteness, we are meant to re-encounter the self, no longer as absorbed in its unreflective fascination with the everyday, but through a dislocational "moment of vision" in which one's authentic potentiality-for-being is disclosed in anxiety. The dilemma and ambivalence we have been investigating in Heidegger's phenomenology is not, however, altogether overcome in this analysis of resoluteness. Resoluteness itself extensively shares the ambiguity we have noted in anxiety, in being-towards-death, and in conscience. For Heidegger's insistence that resoluteness does not "isolate [Dasein] so that it becomes a free-floating ' I ' " (H298) is countered and made tenuous by the thoroughgoing "indefiniteness of [Dasein's] potentiality-for-being" (H308), which is revealed in the correspondingly indefinite characteristic of resoluteness "to hold itself free constantly" (H308). It seems that we are thrown back onto a criterion for action and authentic existence which is so formal, abstract, and indefinite that the prospects for non-arbitrary action in the concrete situations we face in the world are quite problematic. As Heidegger himself asks in another context, so we must wonder here, "where are the signposts" by which Dasein is to sight its course of action, if the significance of the world is so fundamentally displaced in the dislocation which is essential to resoluteness? Jtirgen Habermas, in his foreword to Victor Farias' controversial book, Heidegger et le nazisme,29 argues persuasively that Being and Time effects an "abstraction from the contexts of social life," and a corresponding portrait of authentic existence as occurring "above" concrete history. 3~ Similarly, Karsten Harries details the purely formal character of Heidegger's anatomy of authenticity, and speaks (in a passage we have already cited) of the danger of "transform[ing] the authentic individual into a homeless stranger." Further, both Habermas and Harries remark on the tension this abstraction from the concrete embodiment of Dasein in its world creates with Heidegger's commitment to describing Dasein as

129 inextricably situated in the world, and note a curious consequence of Heidegger's attempt to come to grips with this tension. Already in the latter sections of Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of the need to ground our resolve in the inherited past of a people (Volk). Authentic Dasein is to discover its previously absent concretion in the destiny of Volksgeschichte. We need not detail here how in the works of the early 1930s 31 Heidegger effected a displacement of the historical "Situation" of the individual striving for authentic existence onto what Habermas calls an "idealistically deified history ''32 of the German people, nor how in 1933 he translated this language into the National Socialist vocabulary of Blur und Boden in his notorious Rektoratsrede, the inaugural address he delivered as he assumed the post of Rector Magnificus of Freiburg University. 33 The interesting thing is that with Heidegger's eventual (purported) disillusionment with National Socialism, 34 he abandoned all hope of political engagement, and, as Habermas puts it, "retreat[ed] from the disappointing history of the world" into a quietistic fatalism, 35 and where, as Harries writes, "he live[d] in this world, but as an outsider, whose thinking prevent[ed] him from really belonging to it. ''36 Heidegger thus came to take on the guise of what Hegel refers to as "Stoicism" in his Phenomenology. The stoical consciousness, for Hegel, is motivated by a yearning for freedom, but a yearning which despairs of having its freedom acknowledged in the social and political world, a world in which it feels forsaken, just as the Heideggerian analysis of the experience of anxiety portrays Dasein as feeling lost and "not-at-home" in its everyday world. Hence the stoic practices the movement of withdrawal, and turns inward into the freedom of thought. In thought, the stoic achieves his or her freedom because "in thought ... I am not in an other but remain simply and solely in communion with myself''37 - words which are echoed in Heidegger's portrait of the radical individualization and "non-relatedness" to others which occurs in anxiety, being-towards-death, guilt, conscience, and resoluteness. Moreover, as Habermas and Harries show, and indeed as Heidegger himself as much as admits in his 1966 Der Spiegel interview, 38 Heidegger turned to a "stoical" fatalism in his own life in the post-war years. While it is always dangerous to confuse biography with philosophy, we can at least call attention to a fascinating mirroring of Heidegger's personal history with his account of the authentic self in Being and Time. Heidegger's insistence in Being and Time that authenticity does not cut us off from the world is confounded by the lack of signposts for concrete choice. Just as Hegel's stoic is undermined by a lack of criteria for making its freedom real in the world, Heidegger's account of conscience and resoluteness presents us with a call to action without concrete criteria.

130 For Hegel, the stoic consciousness is fundamentally incomplete and hollow: in the stance of withdrawal, the stoic cannot make over his or her environment in order to reflect the desire for freedom. This is a "freedom" which spurns all the contingencies and determinations of concrete life, "pure form in which nothing is determined," and hence the stoic "becomes perplexed when it is asked for ... a criterion [of its truth], i.e. strictly speaking, for a content of thought itself. ''39 Hegel thus identifies stoicism as a stage of social impotence which is reflected in the abstractness of thought, and criticizes it as a strategy of retreat and escape from concrete reality. I believe we have seen Heidegger's account of authentic existence to be open to a similar critique as the one offered by Hegel against stoicism. It is certainly true that withdrawal from the world is not the guiding intention of authenticity - Heidegger is perfectly clear that authentic being is meant to allow for a recovery of the world in a transformed way. But neither is withdrawal and retreat the motive for stoicism; the stoic's intention is to affirm his or her freedom. And yet for both the stoic and Heidegger's authentic self, withdrawal is the consequence of the strategy of dislocation employed to achieve their aims. It is only when the self encounters itself as utterly alone, radically decentered from the ordinary relations to others which have characterized its forsaken situation in the world, that it is able to confirm its freedom and authenticity. However, precisely in the thoroughgoing abstractness and indefiniteness of the criterion for action which is the natural consequence of this dislocation, we must ask whether Heidegger's authentic self is not equally as "perplexed" as Hegel's stoic in attempting to determine a concrete content for its life, and hence ultimately, equally as impotent. I wish to turn now, in the concluding section of the article, to examine a way of rethinking Heidegger's account of the relation between authentic and inauthentic being which I believe holds some promise for attenuating the extreme formality and corresponding impotence of the authentic self.

4. Curiosity and the aesthetic I mentioned briefly in the past section that Heidegger makes a gesture towards a return of authentic Dasein to the world in his speaking of the need to ground our resolve in the inherited past of a Volk. But this remains only a gesture, since the criteria that would be necessary for determining in which particular respects we are to subordinate individual action to a common historical destiny are just as absent as they are for determining the injunctions of conscience and resolve. Nevertheless, Heidegger's talk of VoIksgeschichte does provide a clue for our goal of making authenticity less

131 abstract: it points to the importance of history, that is, of the past, as a source of concretion for authentic Dasein. As we will see, this is why Heidegger makes so much of the notion of repetition, which is ultimately to establish the unity of temporality that is so important to authentic existence. In the present section I wish to take up this clue, but rather than locating the point of departure for repetition in Volksgeschichte, I will return to Heidegger's central focus in Being and Time on individual Dasein - that Dasein whose potentiality-for-authenticity depends upon its coming face to face with itself in the act of individuation. In this context, the past, or history, which will serve as the locus for repetition is the history of the individual Dasein in its everyday world, the world "out of which and back into which is all existing." It no doubt seems odd to look to the everyday world for the content and principle of concretion for authentic existence, given Heidegger's tendency to associate the everyday with inauthentic being. But if the argument of the previous sections is persuasive, then authentic existence cannot provide this content from itself, since it involves much too formal a delineation of resolute choice. As Heidegger himself seems to recognize in his turn to Volksgeschichte, the criterion for choice can only be made concrete by reference to the past. While it may be true that existence is a perpetual upsurge into the future, there could be no content to this process of metamorphosis unless in the act of choice we were able to recover the past as the ground out of which we appropriate possibilities to project into the future. We cannot simply will to replace the past by the magical creation of a future disencumbered by what has gone before, even if this past is necessarily the history of our everyday life. The question, of course, is what sort of recovery or "repetition" of the past is going to allow for authentic choice. And more specifically, what particular feature of Dasein's everydayness is able to serve as the point of departure for authentic choice? It is here that I believe a close reading of Scren Kierkegaard's analysis of the aesthetic sphere of existence may come to our aid. I will not be offering any systematic analysis of Kierkegaard's extraordinarily complex concept of the aesthetic, but wish instead to use the term in a quite broad sense. 4~ There are, I believe, certain recurring principles and structures of the aesthetic running throughout Kierkegaard's writings. The intriguing thing for the purposes of my present essay is that these structures are largely present in Heidegger's own account of a certain "distinctive tendency of Dasein's Being" (H346) in its everyday existence, namely curiosity. It turns out, however, that Kierkegaard and Heidegger interpret these structures very differently, which leads to very different appraisals of their value. My suggestion will be that it is precisely in the devalued and discredited "tendency of Dasein's being" towards curiosity

132 that an aesthetic contribution (in Kierkegaard's sense) may be found for Dasein's path of self-becoming, which, when appropriated in a resolute fashion, may provide the necessary articulation and concretion of the self's possibilities which we have found to be so lacking in Heidegger's account of authenticity. Let us look at what Heidegger has to say about curiosity, noting along the way some parallels with Kierkegaard. The most general feature of curiosity is the tendency of Dasein towards "just seeing" or "pure beholding" (H170f). We may note that this is directly related to Kierkegaard's association of the aesthetic sphere with the stance of detached spectatorship.41 Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authors describe life from the outside, without being able to enter into it; they are the "poets" and "observers" and "humorists" of the spectacle of life; they are never "adherents" but rather write "experimentally," "for [their] own diversion.''42 Even when the aesthete appears to enter into the flux of life, as for example the practitioner of the "rotation method" or Mozart's Don Giovanni or the author of the "Diary of the Seducer" in Either~Or, this is misleading, since there is never any sense of attachment to their escapades: every experience is ephemeral and accidental, forgotten as soon as it is consummated. In one haunting passage from the aesthetic author of the "Diapsalmata," we read the following: My grief is my castle. It is built like an eagle's nest upon the peak of a mountain lost in the clouds. No one can take it by storm. From this abode I dart down into the world of reality to seize my prey; but I do not remain down there, I bear my quarry aloft to my stronghold. My booty is a picture I weave into the tapestries of my palace. There I live as one dead. I immerse everything I have experienced in a baptism of forgetfulness unto an eternal remembrance. Everything finite and contingent is forgotten and erased. 43 The tendency towards "pure beholding" involves for both Heidegger's curiosity and Kierkegaard's aesthetic sphere a process of objectification by which Dasein "just looks on" at the reality which confronts it so as to distance itself from what the pseudonymous aesthete of Kierkegaard's "Diapsalmata" calls "the nothingness which pervades reality, ''44 the alienating and burdensome character of our being-in-the-world. The underlying principle of this detachment is a thoroughgoing restlessness in which the curious onlooker is swept up in an endless search for distraction (H172), which is itself a symptom of his or her attempted flight from anxiety. So too for Kierkegaard, the aesthetic is marked by restlessness, a life which "drifts on ''45 from one possibility to another without ever entering into choice or commitment, and is at bottom precisely a strategy of life to divert the self from despair and anxiety.

133 Diversion is sought, according to Heidegger, in a quest for the "excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters" which "seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty" (H172). Similarly, for Kierkegaard's aesthete, "life is a masquerade . . . . [an] inexhaustible material for amusement. ''46 The aesthete seeks to reduce all experiences to the categories of "the interesting" and "the boring," and uses the art of "poetic memory" so as to escape (forget) the essential ennui of life and transform reality into a stage for enjoyment. Curiosity is inauthentic because it is a dislocation from care - it is, we might say, a "care-free" attitude without any concern for reality. Nevertheless, it is important to notice that there is a certain content and concretion to curiosity which is absent in Heidegger's portrayal of authentic existence: while "that in the face of which one has anxiety is completely indefinite," in curiosity "nothing is closed off" - all possibilities of our being-in-the-world are grist for its mill. In its irrepressible spirit of exploration, curiosity determines a progessively richer content for choice. To be sure, the curious mind does not itself authentically appropriate this content in its care-free, forgetful way of being, where all that it explores serves only the purpose of entertainment. And yet there is nothing indefinite about this content. The great value of curiosity is precisely that it seeks to detach itself from any limited perspective; it is not concerned to narrow its sight by the confines of common opinion, but is a "lust of the eyes," as Heidegger says (citing Augustine, H171), to explore every possibility it can. The question that arises is whether there is some way in which the content for choice determined by curiosity could be taken up - or better, sublimated, aufgehoben, taken up in a transformed way - by authentic Dasein, thus providing the concretion we have found to be so lacking in authenticity, while at the same time avoiding the inauthentic features of curiosity. If this is possible, then we could see the curious mind as serving an analogous role to that of the aesthetic sphere in Kierkegaard, which, as James Collins puts it, "constituted [Kierkegaard's] own fundamental education and progress toward truth ''47 - that is, a necessary propadeutic or preparation for the path towards authentic being. In his early "Essay in Experimental Psychology," Repetition, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Constantine Constantius describes what he calls the "shadow theater" of the aesthetic personality in a passage which bears remarkably close resemblance to the Heideggerian portrayal of curiosity. Surely there is no young man [nor, presumably, any young woman!] with any imagination who has not at one time been captivated by the enchantment of the theater, and desired to be himself carried away into the midst of that fictitious reality in order to see and hear himself as an alter ego, to

134 disperse himself among the innumerable possibilities which diverge from himself.... In such a dream of imagination the individual is not a real figure but a shadow, or rather ... a multiplicity of shadows .... The personality is not yet discovered, its energy announces itself only in the passion of possibility .... So does ... the individual stray at random amongst [his] possibilities, discovering now one and now another .... In o r d e r [to avoid] any impression of his real self, this cryptic individual requires that the environment be as light and ephemeral as the figures of the twilight, as the frothy effervescence of the words which sound without echo .... However, this shadow existence also demands its satisfaction, and it is never good for a man if he does not get time to live out his life, although on the other hand it is pitiful or comic when an individual 'lives himself out' in this way. 48 Kierkegaard, it is important to note, was painfully aware of the danger of this shadow theater, a danger where "possibility becomes for the self ever greater and greater, where more and more things become possible because nothing becomes actual. ''49 Kierkegaard's own life was an unresolved tension and ambivalence between the mask (the pseudonymous-cryptic) and the "edifying" ("direct communication"), between the poet's dance and the Christian's leap. He walked a thin line between the shadow world of the aesthete and a "radical breach" with that world, between the artist's infinite perspectives and the knight of faith's "willing one thing." But the great risk of the shadow theater is also for Kierkegaard the very condition for the possibility of an ascent or transcendence: the development and shaping of Dasein's being into an authentic existence depends upon its first finding itself submerged in the imaginative projections of its infinite possibilities. Hence "this shadow existence also demands its satisfaction." It is from within this submersion in the flux of possibility that despair and anxiety are first encountered; the self experiences itself as a "self-consuming yearning" for concretion, a "hunger" for some "decisive step" which might overcome the "anxiety ... of a terrible emptiness. ''5~ With this anxiety, the possibility of decision, of self-choice, emerges. But it is only out of the prior exploration of the self's possibilities through the "theatrical" acting-out of Dasein's diverging projections - an activity which sounds so much like Heidegger's description of curiosity - that the articulation of a sweeping panorama of possibilities for self-determination arises. Without this acting-out, the self remains either abandoned to the confining and stultifying world of experience dictated by the 'They,' or else wholly indeterminate, just as Heidegger's anxiety-laden individual must remain an indeterminate self without the concretion made available by curiosity. Self-determination is for Kierkegaard, as for Heidegger, made possible through the appropriation of the self's potentialities in repetition: "he who chooses repetition," Constantine Constantius writes, "alone truly lives; ...

135 he does not chase after butterflies, for he has known what they are. ''51 But before tuming to a discussion of repetition, we should first prepare the way by looking at an issue we have thus far neglected: the importance of time for both Heidegger's and Kierkegaard's portrayals of authentic being. All of the existentialists - and for the sake of the present discussion I am including Heidegger in this category - place special importance on temporality in their accounts of the relation between inauthentic and authentic being: these two ways of being are largely distinguished in terms of opposing ways of relating to time. Further, of the three temporal "ecstases" of time (past, present, and future), priority is given to the future, since as we have seen, the existentialists define "Existenz" as transcendence, the perpetual projection of possibilities "into the future. It is existing towards the future which gives our lives meaning, by directing us towards the undertaking of constant self-renewal and self-creation. Thus for Heidegger, authentic temporality is "anticipatory": the structure of "anticipatory resoluteness," where Dasein anticipates its own death, orients Dasein towards the future in such a way as to disclose its authentic potentiality-for-being. And yet both Kierkegaard and Heidegger acknowledge the importance of a recovery of the past, since authenticity ultimately aims at the unification of the self, and this demands a synthesis of the three moments of time. A self which was only projected into the future would be impossible to imagine, since projection is a "throw" of possibilities which emerge in time and hence necessarily have a past. As we have noted, the inauthentic self has no unification, but is is a dispersed self, and we can see how this dispersion involves a peculiar relation to time. At its extreme - an extreme represented by Heidegger's curiosity and Kierkegaard's aesthetic sphere inauthenticity is a desperate way of life in which we seek to escape the burden of both past and future time, and to live instead in the fragmented temporality of the present, which itself is only an illusion, a perpetually fleeting "now. ''52 We can see this very clearly in the "cryptic" individual described by Constantine Constantius in the passage from Repetition cited above. This is a self who obstinately strives to have no past, just as Heidegger's curious individual has a "craving for the new" (H346), seeking constant novelty so as to evade the staleness of the past. He or she lives in the dream of imagination, in the passion of pure possibility; to ground her personality in the past would only tie her down, would only encumber her with un unwanted weight of accountability. Any repetition would deliver her over to boredom, the tedium of recycling an already experienced life. As such there is no continuity to her life, for this is just what she fears: she lives in the world of masks, of disguises, reveling in the fictitious, evading at all costs the burden of becoming an actual self.

136 This cryptic individual seeks to live in a perpetual "now," gliding along the surface of life, in the light and ephemeral environment of shadows, the figures of twilight - the dream-life of infinite possibility. No sooner is one possibility realized than another and yet another beckons her; she never tarries but endlessly disperses herself amongst the fragmented apparitions of her dreams. But in denying the past, there is an important sense in which our shadowactor denies the future as well. Since every action is merely the exploration of one in an endless series of equally weighted possibilities, she refuses to construct any bonds between her actions and the future: her actions are "words which sound without echo," without consequences, for consequences are forgotten even before they occur. Every moment is the beginning of a fresh possibility, a new shadow; the future is merely the stage for further "nows," further fleeting shadows. Like Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera, who has seduced 1,003 women 1,003 and counting, 1,003 and then an infinitely stretching ellipsis - the next conquest is all that matters. The former seductions are drowned in forgetfulness, so that the past does not exist. And the future is only the endless ellipsis, each dot unto infinity only an ephemeral, effervescent point in time, punctuating an infinity of "nows." Kierkegaard tells us that this is no real self at all, but merely a shadow. This is finally a life of illusion, since time cannot successfully be reduced to a series of nows. The cryptic individual lives, as it were, in a parenthesis, the deceptive parenthesis of the "now." Living in the fragmented temporality of the inexhaustible series of discrete "nows," the self is dissolved away into a multiplicity of disconnected atoms; the self has no unification, no more than the illusory temporality of the endless succession of "nows" has any unity. Our shadow-actor lives under the spell of the dream world, captivated by the enchantment of sheer change for the sake of change, in an eternal flight from the circularity of time. We may now return to the importance of repetition in Heidegger's and Kierkegaard's accounts of authenticity. Repetition, we might say, is a sort of recapturing of the self, a breaking o f the spell of captivation by the beguiling charm of the fleeting "now." It calls us to a recollection of the past, so that the sense of continuity necessary for the unification of the self can arise. Through such a recollective recovery of the past, the nature of choice and action becomes radically transformed (and with it, the nature of the self). The cryptic-curious-aesthetic individual makes no fundamental choices - every possibility has equal weight, just so long as it is new. But as such, there is no commitment, no resolve, no genuine of act of will, and hence no genuine self-possession. Repetition, on the other hand, allows for the emergence of authentic choice, choice which is a projection of the past

137 into the future, so that in the recollection of our past actions they cease to have the merely ephemeral character of fleeting and isolated points in time, but emerge as the possibilities for fundamental choice and self-affirmation. Through repetition we are able to re-collect our past and bring it into our current situation. Only in this way can time become the stage for our projects, our creation of a continuum in which past actions anticipate a realization in future time. Only with such a repetition is the continuity which unifies the self possible. In repetition there is a return to the s e l f - what Heidegger calls a "coming back understandingly [of Dasein] to [its] ownmost 'been'" (H326). As Kierkegaard says, repetition is the "circumnavigation of life [which must be made] before one begins to [truly, authentically] live. ''53 With repetition the self incorporates its possibilities, no longer as shadows, but as actual, concrete self-reflections. As the youth of Repetition says, in achieving his repetition: I am no longer distracted and separated from m y s e l f . . . . I am born to myself again . . . . I have staked my life, lost it, and won it again. 54 Possibility is transformed into actuality, the "voice [of the shadow theater] which sounds without echo" becomes articulate, concrete. Repetition, Constantine tells us, is the "counter-current of eternity flowing back into the present, ''55 the return of the self from the infinite play of possibility, and a breaking of the circle of the infinite yearning and anxiety entailed by this shadow-play. But, to state the obvious, it is only possible to repeat what has once been circumnavigated, and as such the category of repetition presupposes a first inauthentic articulation of what can only afterwards be transformed through repetition. Heidegger, however, has rejected the first circumnavigation of life offered by curiosity. While he claims that Dasein's authentic existence "maintains itself" in everyday concern (H352) and does not "float above falling everydayness," in the actual dislocation or "wrenching away" of Dasein from the everyday world, in the uncanny sense of being "not-at-home" in the world, in the utter non-relationality of Dasein to its everyday environment, and in the complete indefiniteness of Dasein's conscience and resolve, Heidegger has stranded authentic being without recourse to the aesthetic "theater of infinite possibility" which might serve as a source of content in the act of repetition. In a famous passage from his Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes the claim that "it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified. ''56 Kierkegaard does not go nearly this far. Indeed the aesthetic is only a propadeutic, a preparation, a first stage on the path of self-becoming, a stage which is finally radically incomplete and, if allowed to dominate our lives, radically inauthentic. The aesthetic must be

138 sublimated into a higher way of being - ultimately, for Kierkegaard, an ethical and religious way of being - as it is by the Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling who "recovers the finite," the "aesthetic" sphere of everyday life, but only after transcending and hence transforming it. As Judge William says in Either~Or, we must come to see the aesthetic as an "ally" of authentic being, not as excluded by it. 57 The aesthetic "possess[es] validity," the good Judge insists, even within t h e sphere of authentic existence, although it must be "dethroned" from its position of dominance, and hence transformed: the aesthetic "has not at all the same meaning [for the authentic individual] as for the man who lives aestheticaUy. ''58 Heidegger represents the opposite pole from Nietzsche, for his account of authentic being entirely excludes any contribution from the essentially aesthetic sphere of curiosity. But as such, he rejects the first "circumnavigation" of life which is presupposed by repetition. Heidegger's principle of dislocation from Dasein's absorption in the everyday world reduces curiosity to a mere distraction from authenticity, and at the same stroke he abandons authentic Dasein to a stoical emptiness, where the voice of conscience is perpetually silent, a voice sounding without echo. Kierkegaard represents a middle position between Nietzsche and Heidegger, neither reducing existence to the aesthetic shadow and dream world nor negating the importance of the aesthetic exploration of possibilities. As such, Kierkegaard's theory of the sublimation of the aesthetic through authentic repetition presents a way to resolve the abstract and formal character of Heidegger's phenomenology of authentic being while still allowing for a clear line of distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity.

Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), H179. Page citations are to the standard pagination of the later German editions, given by Macquarrie and Robinson as 'H' pages. All further references to Being and Time will be given parenthetically in the text, abbreviated by 'H'. 2. Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), p. 193. See also Michael Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self." The Development of Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981). Zimmerman argues that to understand Heidegger "correctly we must begin by distinguishing between everydayness and inauthenticity," but he goes on to note that "unfortunately. . . . Heidegger himself does not always distinguish adequately between these two phenomena" (p. 44). Compare Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heideg-

139

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

ger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), p. 314: "in dem Begriff 'verfallen' soil also der spezifische Bewegungscharakter der 'Uneigentlichkeit' der Existenz zum Ausdruck kommen, in der das Dasein seine Freiheit nicht iibernimmt." Winfried Franzen makes a similar point in his Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Veflagsbuchhandlung, 1976), p. 45: "Offiziell ist die Analyse zwar neutral, faktisch jedoch stellt sie eine scharfe Kritik an den analysierten Erscheinungen dar, woran der gehiiufte Gebrauch pejorativer Vokabeln keinen Zweifel Eiflt. Die Alltdglichkeit, die an sich gegeniiber der Differenz yon Eigentl&hkeit und Uneigentlichkeit neutral sein wollte und zuniichst sogar ... als das Urspriingliche herausgestellt wurde, wird an einer bestimmten Stelle, n?imlich da, woes urns Mit- und Selbstsein geht, zur Uneigentlichkeit." Karsten Harries, "Heidegger as a Political Thinker," Review of Metaphysics 29 (1975-76): 647. Compare Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff, p. 360: "Die Schwierigkeit dieser Konzeption [Tugendhat is referring to Heidegger's conception of the need for concrete possibilities to be disclosed to authenticity] liegt offenbar darin, daft zwischen der formalen Bestimmung des eigentlichen Selbstseins (als Vorlaufen zum Tode usw.) und dem Entwurf der jeweiligen konkreten Mi~glichkeiten ein unvermittelter Sprung liegt." Jiirgen Habermas also speaks of Heidegger's "abstraction from the contexts of social life," and remarks on "the contrast ... between a pretension of radical historical thinking and the fact that Heidegger rigidly maintained the abstraction of historicity (as the condition of historical existence itself) ... from actual historical processes," in his essay on "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective," trans. John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 434, 437. See Being and Time, H190 (n iv), and H235 (n vi). For some comments on Kierkegaard's influence on Heidegger on the nature of resoluteness, see Zimmerman, Eclipse, pp. 69, 77-79; and George Stack, Kierkegaard's Existential Ethics (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1977), p. 136. See Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 205-209. Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, in Martin Heidegger Gesamtsausgabe, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm yon Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1975), vol. 9, p. 126. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 98. Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Les Editions Nagel, 1968), p. 93. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, in Walter Kaufmann's Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 597. Sartre, L'Existentialisme, p. 92: "Man is always outside of himself." it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he exists as man." My translation, emphasis added. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1969), pp. 120, 139, emphasis added. See also p. 140: "The being of human reality is suffering because it is perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it." Kierkegaard, Postscript, p. 116.

140 13. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 148, 151,143. 14. Zimmerman, Eclipse, p. 71. 15. It is important to recognize that this passage is Heidegger's statement of the problem of Dasein's being-as-a-whole, and not his last word on the issue. In his analysis of being-towards-death, anticipatory resoluteness, and the phenomenon of repetition, Heidegger believes he has found the answer to this question. 16. See, for example, Joan Stambaugh, "An Inquiry Into Authenticity and Inauthenticity in Being and Time," Research in Phenomenology 7 (1977): 154. See also Zimmerman, Eclipse, pp. xxx, 6, 119; and Zimmerman, "On Discriminating Everydayness, Unownedness, and Falling in Being and Time," Research in Phenomenology 5 (1975): 109n, 110. 17. See Zimmerman, Eclipse, pp. 71,103, 104, 119. 18. Zimmerman, Eclipse, p. 44. See also Zimmerman, "On Discriminating Everdayness," pp. 110, 117, 118. 19. Alberto Rosales, Transzendenz und Differenz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), p. 19. Fridolin Wiplinger makes a similar point in his Wahrheit und Geschichtlichkeit (Munich: Alber, 1961), p. 220. 20. See also Grundprobleme der Phdnomenologie, in Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe vol. 24, p. 228: "Wir verstehen uns alltdglich .... nicht eigentlich im strengen wortsinne .... sondern uneigentlich." The Grundprobleme was given as a lecture course at Marburg in the summer semester of 1927, the year of the publication of Being and Time. 21. Zimmerman also makes this point. See "On Discriminating Everydayness," pp. 122, 127. 22. Kierkegaard, Postscript, pp. 412, 116, 113, and see 436-37. See also Kierkegaard's "edifying discourse" on "The Expectation of an Eternal Happiness," in Edifying Discourses: A Selection, ed. Paul L. Holmer, trans. David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), pp. 109-135. 23. Tugendhat, pp. 360, 361. 24. Harries, p. 649. 25. Habermas, p. 439. 26. On this issue of Heidegger's critique of the traditional definition of the self, see for example Jacques Derrida, "Of Spirit," trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 461-2; Stambaugh, p. 154, Franzen, p. 44; Zimmerman, Eclipse, p. 115. 27. Theunissen, p. 169. 28. Theunissen, p. 190. 29. This forward was reprinted in Critical Inquiry as "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective" (see fn 3 above). 30. Habermas, pp. 439,441. 31. Most especially the lectures On The Essence of Truth and Plato's Doctrine of Truth (1930-31). This tendency is also present in later works such as An Introduction to Metaphysics (first published in 1953, but based on a lecture from 1935), H~lderlin and the Essence of Poetry (1936), and even the post-war text The Origin of the Work of Art (1946). 32. Habermas, p. 441. 33. See, for example, Harries, pp. 643-45, 651-55; and Thomas Sheehan,

141

Heidegger, The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), pp. 31--44. 34. One must speak of Heidegger's purported disillusionment with National Socialism, since whether or not he ever really abandoned his sympathies with National Socialism is a subject of hot debate. See, for example, Thomas Sheehan's review of Victor Farias' Heidegger et le nazisme in The New York Review of Books 35.10 (June 1988): 38-47. 35. Habermas, p. 448. 36. Harries, p. 668. 37. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 120. 38. The Spiegel interview was not published until 1977, after Heidegger's death, at his request. In the interview Heidegger claims that "only a god can save us now," since "philosophy is over": "philosophy will not be able to effect any direct transformation of the present state of the world." Hence Heidegger has been "led to silence" and can be of "no help": "for us today the greatness of what is to be thought is too great." Translated by David Schendler in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6.1 (Winter, 1977): 18, 19, 21, 27. 39. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 122. 40. Kierkegaard's concept of the aesthetic is notoriously complex. In one sense, the aesthetic is one of three broad "stages on life's way," the first stage in a dialectical triad which moves ideally into the ethical and culminates in the religious. The aesthetic sphere itself has several distinct forms, ranging from the sensual immediacy of Don Juan to the scepticism of Faust and the despairing consciousness of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, with many intermediate gradations along the way. Finally, Kierkegaard labels several of his texts as "aesthetic" works, written under a variety of pseudonyms, and this raises the whole question of a particular theory of communication implied by the use of aesthetic "masks" for the purpose of "indirect communication." 41. For an excellent discussion of this point, see Stephen Crites' Introduction to his translation of Kierkegaard's Crisis in the Life of an Actress (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 21. 42. See especially the appendix to Johannes Climacus' Postscript, "For an Understanding with the Reader," pp. 545-550. 43. Kierkegaard, Either~Or, vol. 1, p. 41. 44. Kierkegaard, Either~Or, vol. 1, p. 287. 45. Kierkegaard, Either~Or, vol. 2, p. 170. 46. Kierkegaard, Either~Or, vol. 2, p. 163. 47. James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), p. 37. 48. Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 58, 60. 49. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, p. 169. 50. Kierkegaard, Either~Or, vol. 1, pp. 25, 36. 51. Kierkegaard, Repetition, pp. 34, 35. 52. Calvin O. Schrag has a very fine discussion of how inauthentic existence is dominated by the temporality of the present in his Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961), pp. 133-36. 53. Kierkegaard, Repetition, p. 34 (emphasis added). 54. Kierkegaard, Repetition, p. 125.

142 55. Kierkegaard, Repetition, p. 40. 56. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Kaufmann, Basic Writings, p. 52. Actually, Nietzsche makes this remark three times in The Birth (see also pp. 22, 141). 57. Kierkegaard, Either~Or, vol. 2, p. 150. 58. Kierkegaard, Either~Or, vol. 2, p. 230.