References
- Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, vol. 6 of Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2003), 424. Transl. by K. Tarnowski and F. Will, Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973), 17.
- Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1991), 35. Transl. by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell 1978), from now on referred to as SZ. References are given to the German pagination which can be found in the margins of the English translation.
- E.g., Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, 427/20; Douglas Kellner, “Authenticity and Heidegger's Challenge to Ethical Theory” in Thinking about Being: Aspects of Heidegger's Thought ed. R.W. Shehan & J.N. Mohanty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1984), 161; Charles Guignon, “Becoming a Self: The Role of the Concept of Authenticity in Being and Time” in The Existentialists, ed. C. Guignon (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2003), 129.
- A third, interrelated question would concern the relation between philosophy and non- philosophy (or common sense, or the natural attitude). I have discussed this question briefly in my article “How is a Phenomenology of Fundamental Moods Possible?” in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 3, (London: Routledge) 2007, arguing that there is some affinity, but no coinciding of authenticity and philosophy. Particularly, it is nonsensical to conclude that certain specific philosophers were or were not authentic.
- For example, Oliver Cosmus discusses several positions regarding the “hypothesis of transformation or conversion” to show how Being and Time is frequently misread as an “instruction for being authentic.” Cf. Oliver Cosmus, Anonyme Phänomenologie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2001), 53 ff.
- SZ 130; a very similar statement can be found on page 267.
- I will leave “Man” untranslated since both the option “the They” and “the One” strike me as problematic.
- Stephen Mulhall, Routledge GuideBook to Heidegger and Being and Time, (London: Routledge 1996), 144.
- Ibid., 145.
- Ibid., 198.
- Most interpreters conflate the two categories. As a consequence, they need to either dismiss Heidegger's statement that authenticity is not a moralizing category or claim that there are no ethical implications. Those who use “ethical” in a sense that is distinct from “moral” tend to focus on Heidegger's late philosophy and especially on the “Letter on Humanism” in which Heidegger mentions an “original ethics” which takes ethos literally as the abode of man (Cf. “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins 1993), 258). Jean-Luc Nancy maintains that Heidegger's Kehre corresponds to a “reinforcement or a ‘folding’ of the ethical motif’ (J.-L. Nancy, “Heidegger's ‘Originary Ethics’” in Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, ed. F. Raffoul & D. Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press 2002), 66). While I do not contest this claim, my interest lies particularly with an ethical dimension in Being and Time. Miguel de Beistegui seems to use the term “ethical” in a fashion similar to the current article when he examines “Ethical truth” in Being and Time. However, the strong emphasis which de Beistegui places on self-transparency seems unhelpful and potentially misleading to me, as my remarks on ambiguity below show. Cf. Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum 2005), 43 ff.
- Douglas Kellner, “Authenticity and Heidegger's Challenge to Ethical Theory,” 162, his emphasis.
- Kellner, “Authenticity and Heidegger's Challenge to Ethical Theory,” 161 & 170.
- Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1986), 467 ff. Cf. § 59 of SZ where Heidegger examines the relation between the existential and the vulgar (or the ontological and ontical) understandings of conscience and guilt.
- While Derrida (in “Heidegger's Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV) in Commemorations: Reading Heidegger from the Start, ed. J. Sallis. (Indiana: Indiana University Press 1993) points out that only few interpreters have ever attended to the sentence about the voice of the friend at all—namely, Christopher Fynsk (Heidegger, Thought and Historicity), Jean François Courtine (“Voix de la conscience et vocation de l'être”) and Jean-Luc Nancy (“La decision d'existence”)—, it now seems to have become commonplace not only to consider this phrase important, but to connect it to the call of conscience. Even those interpreters (e.g., Rudi Visker) who acknowledge that the connection between the earlier passage and the later one is by no means unambiguous deem it necessary to reference the earlier passage, thereby taking it for granted that there is some connection. Cf. Rudi Visker, “Dropping—The ‘Subject’ of Authenticity.” In Deconstructive Subjectivities. Ed. P. Dews & S. Critchley (Albany: State University of New York Press 1996).
- Such a circularity is not specific to Heidegger, but can already be found in Aristotle, under the headings of potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (energeia). However, Heidegger also focuses on the way in which the transition from potentiality to actuality can be described. Even though it seems to me that the terminology of wanting or being willing to listen to the call of conscience is not in itself contradictory or paradoxical, it is worth noting that Heidegger, in his late philosophy, would describe such a scenario not in terms of the will and resoluteness, but in terms of openness, readiness, and letting-be. One may wonder whether the sections on the call of conscience in certain ways also point to Heidegger's Kehre (although not as much as other sections of Being and Time) as it becomes obvious that “openness” to a call is ultimately a more appropriate description than “wanting to hear.”
- Visker, “Dropping—The ‘Subject’ of Authenticity,” 67.
- Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, 421; Jargon of Authenticity, 12 f.
- Visker writes: “What if, since, as Heidegger stresses, ‘hearing is constitutive for Rede’ (206/163), and since one can hear either the voice of the others or the voice of the friend, it reveals instead that Rede itself is therefore, even before vocalization, already in itself exposed to the risk of ambiguity?” (82).
- For a more encompassing treatment of ambiguity in Heidegger's Being and Time, see Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge 1995), esp. 31 ff. & 44 ff.
- Merleau-Ponty's distinction between “good” and “bad” ambiguity might be helpful here. Good and bad, in this context, are neither moral nor ethical concepts; Merleau-Ponty ascribes “good ambiguity” to a fruitful, “bad ambiguity” to an evasive approach toward ambiguity. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “An unpublished text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work.” In The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1964), 11. This distinction is well analyzed in Waldenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1983), 142–217.
- Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969), 202.
- Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 66.
- Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 66.
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 7.
- Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press 2000), 212. In this text, Heidegger suggests a return to the Greek sense of ethics as connected to the ethos or habitat (18).
- I can therefore not agree with Françoise Dastur who states in her insightful essay “The Call of Conscience: The Most Intimate Alterity”: “Consequently, it seems to me that Heidegger's position, which consists in depriving all content from the silent call of conscience, remains within the strict line of Kantian thought” (in Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, ed. F. Raffoul & D. Pettigrew, 93).