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How to be more authentic, according to Martin

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger, German philosopher (1889–1976)

This is a modified version of a section of an essay of mine entitled “Being-towards-God:

Heidegger and the Relationship Between Man and God in Muslim Ritual Prayer,” published
in the Journal of Islamic Philosophy, 8:24–44 (2012)

TLDR Summary: From birth to death, we are surrounded by people and things, and we have
no clear idea where we come from or why we are here, at least outside of any specific religion.
Most of us try to conform to however we think most other people want or expect us to behave.
This leads us away from our true selves, causing us to live inauthentically. Many people have
trouble facing the fact that they will die, and their response is often to ignore it. Instead, they
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throw themselves even more into the world, into their work, into living up to the various

expectations they think other people have of them—or they simply buy more stuff to distract
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themselves from the anxiety of knowing they will eventually die. Facing the fact that we will
one day die and that no one can take our place, and not shying away from that, is the first
step toward being true to ourselves, the first step toward saying, “I don’t care what other
people think or say, I’m going to do what’s right for me.”

WHO ARE YOU?

Who are you really? Are you sure? How do you know?

Martin Heidegger, possibly the twentieth century’s most important political

philosopher, has some answers.

Let’s get started.

THE QUESTION OF BEING

From the moment we are born until we die, we are surrounded by things, or beings —
literally, all things that exist. That includes us.

There are inanimate beings, like rocks, and animate beings, like fish or people. At first,
it may appear that people are no different than other living beings. But according to
Heidegger, there is something about us that makes us different from all other living
creatures. And that something is the key to living an authentic life. To understand his
argument, we need to know more about what he means by the “question of being.”

We live on a being we call planet earth, in a world filled with beings like and unlike
ourselves. Most beings are composites of other beings. For instance, the being we call
a car is made up of a number of parts that exist as individual beings in their own right,
and these, in turn, can be broken down further. Humans love labelling things, so we
have names for practically every single part of every single thing, down to the atom
and sub-atomic particle.

This, of course, is to use the concept of Being in its most basic sense — Being is that
universal quality which all things that exist have. As Heidegger points out, however,
“if it is said that ‘Being’ is the most universal concept, this cannot mean that it is the
one which is clearest or that needs no further discussion. It is rather the darkest of all.”
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The question of Being initially looks something like this: where do we and all the
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various things in our lives come from and why are we, and they, here? For that matter,
where does here come from and why does it exist at all? What exactly are these beings?
What does their existence mean, and by extension, ours?

In other words, why is there something and not nothing?

The traditional metaphysical or religious answer is that a divine being, ground, god,
prime mover, or some other mysterious but discrete first cause, is responsible for the
existence of all other beings. The problem, Heidegger points out, is that this does not
really answer the question. Clearly, saying that beings come from a specific being does
not help answer the question of where beings come from and why. Where did that
being come from?

Yet what is the alternative to saying that a particular being is responsible for all other
beings? Nothing comes from nothing, right? In fact, in his lecture, and subsequent
essay, “What is Metaphysics,” Heidegger suggests that beings, as such, come precisely
from nothing. This is too easy, though. All Heidegger is effectively saying is that beings,
as such, must come to be, and ultimately this means that, prior to their existence,
there must have been nothing — hence, beings, as beings, come from nothing. The
only other possible answer, as we have seen, is even less helpful.

But this is only the beginning. It successfully shows the poverty of metaphysics, or
standard religious explanations, but it does not get us much closer to answering the
question of Being itself. All it does is help us dispense with metaphysics to better focus
on the original question.

THE MEANING OF BEING

In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the “meaning of Being” — the ultimate
mystery — can be “discerned” in an entity he calls Dasein. It is not a question of what
Being is, which would necessitate a metaphysical answer of the type Heidegger
critiques, but what Being means.

This entity—Dasein—is unique, Heidegger says, because it is the only entity for which
Being is even a question — namely, us. That’s what makes humans different from
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other creatures—we’re the only ones who seem to ask these kinds of questions! But

why should it be a question for us? This has everything to do with the nature of Dasein
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— our nature, as humans.

In his inaugural lecture at Freiburg University two years after the publication of Being
and Time, Heidegger states baldly, “Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing.”
But what does this mean?

Being held out into the nothing means being aware of the possibility of nothing,
instead of something, existing — including the possibility that we might not exist —
and therefore the possibility of anything existing. Humans are uniquely aware, or
have the capacity to be aware, of such possibilities, Heidegger argues, and this is what
potentially gives rise to selfhood and freedom — authenticity, or authentic living.

It is important to note that Dasein is an entity that in each case we ourselves,

individually, are. Thus, the quality Heidegger calls “Mineness belongs to any existent
Dasein.” Consequently, the selfhood and freedom Heidegger says being held out into
the nothing allows for is none other than ours.

As we shall see later, however, Heidegger’s notion of the ‘mineness’ of Dasein does not
mean that the selfhood of each individual person’s Dasein is always distinct from
others’; ‘mineness’ can be collective as well as individualistic and, for Heidegger, a
people can be just as much an individual as a person. This can be a problem if you
want to be true to your authentic self — if you can even know what that is.

Heidegger says the ‘nothing’ is disclosed to us in anxiety. Through anxiety, of a special

kind, we can glimpse a true image of ourselves. Yet presumably, if, through anxiety
and conscience, we are revealed to ourselves, we must have existed prior to this.

We know that Human is Dasein, but who, Heidegger asks, is Dasein in its everydayness?
The answer will lead us through Heidegger’s concepts of Being-in-the-world (In-der-
Welt-sein), thrownness (Geworfenheit), and falling (Verfall), to his concepts of authentic
and inauthentic ways of Being, conscience, and ultimately Being-towards-death.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE “THEY”: WHY WE ARE NOT TRUE TO

OURSELVES

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At birth, Heidegger explains, we are thrown into a world not of our own making or
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choosing. Being-in-the-world, for Heidegger, is the “essential state” of Dasein, or simply,
humans. By this, he means to say Dasein is always in the world. As such, “It is not the
case that man ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of- Being towards the
‘world’.” Dasein — we — may achieve a “new status of Being” towards the world, but we
are never not in-the-world.

Being-in-the-world, in turn, means forever being bound up with those things that
concern us that we encounter in the world we are thrown into. We ascribe different
values to these things, experiencing some of them as merely present-at-hand, referring
to things whose existence we are aware of, but which do not particularly concern us,
and ready-to-hand, referring to those things we ascribe value to and are thus engaged
with.

The values we ascribe to things and the way we comport ourselves toward them are
determined by the selfhood of Dasein. If what we are is Dasein, that still does not say
who Dasein is. Who are we? Who can we be?

Not only is Dasein thrown into a world, such that its thrownness forever characterizes
its Being, so long as it exists, Dasein also has a tendency towards fallenness, according
to Heidegger, which is to say inauthenticity.

For Heidegger, the fallenness of Dasein does not, as might be imagined, represent a
deviation from a natural state of purity. Rather, fallenness is the natural, or at lease
average, state of Dasein, of humans. He means this is a specific, technical sense, not a
religious one.

“The Self of everyday Dasein,” Heidegger writes, “is the they-self.” We fall in with the
they and are consequently not ourselves. Rather, who we are is they. This is what he
calls the “real dictatorship of the they.”

But who is this they? It is none other than the mass of people we encounter and relate
to in our everyday lives — the Others like ourselves.

When we think and act the way they do, or the way they think we should, when we
ascribe the same values to things as they do — not because we have searched
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ourselves and found that we agree with them, but because it is often simply easier,
more comfortable, to go with the flow — we relinquish our authentic selfhood to the
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they-self.

This presents a problem, however, in that it prevents us from ascribing the actions of
an individual person to an individual self, thus negating accountability, and it makes it
difficult to determine precisely why we act the way we do. As Heidegger puts it,
“because the ‘they’ presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the
particular Dasein of its answerability. … in Dasein’s everydayness the agency through
which most things come about is one of which we must say that ‘it was no one’.” Not
only that, but it limits the possibilities of Being — the different ways particular Daseins
might be — to the “averageness” the they-self permits. This is what Heidegger calls the
“levelling down” tendency in Dasein. We cannot simply do anything we might want to,
we cannot necessarily strive to be the best; the they-self must approve.

HOW TO LIVE AUTHENTICALLY

Dasein, as the they-self, represents an inauthentic mode of Being. For Heidegger, we
are what we do. Hence, authentic Being is the work of claiming one’s own self through
one’s own, self-directed, as opposed to they-self-directed, actions. Inauthentic Being,
then, consists of acting according to the will of the they-self, and thus not as oneself.
Inauthentic Being is the norm for Dasein, according to Heidegger. Yet in both instances
Heidegger stresses that Dasein is ours alone — we are what we are, in the sense of what
we do, if not always who we truly are. Therefore, the concepts of authenticity and
inauthenticity do not mean more or less Being, and they do not even really mean more
or less authentic Being, but rather more or less authentic ways of Being.

For Heidegger, there is an abstract, pre-secular, authentic self and the self in practice.
While dividing the self into a ‘who’, indicating a nature or essence, and a ‘what’,
indicating a state of being, is helpful for understanding Heidegger’s argument, in
practice, we are no more than what we do. What we do, in turn, either corresponds to
the authentic, pre-secular self that Heidegger’s thought implies, and indeed requires to
remain logically consistent, or the they-self. The self either comes from the they, or
from a rejection of the they, as such, in response to a felt call to a more authentic mode
of Being.

But how can we be in a more authentic way, and why would we want, or need, to be?
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But how can we be in a more authentic way, and why would we want, or need, to be?

We may be what we do, but as Heidegger points out, we can delegate almost everything
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we do to other people if the need or desire arises. If I normally work as a baker but
cannot or do not want to work on a given day, I can likely find someone else to take my
place. This is what Heidegger calls the ability of one Dasein to represent another, which
is one of Dasein’s many “possibilities of Being.”

There is one thing we all do, however, which Heidegger reminds us we cannot
delegate — which cannot be represented by someone else: die. We must all face death
alone. Death represents the culmination of our Being, bringing wholeness, in
Heidegger’s language, to our otherwise perpetually unfinished Being (since we are
what we do and as long as we are alive there will always be new things to do, new
possibilities of Being, and so our Being will never be complete so long as we live).

In bringing our Being to completion, death returns our Being to the nothing from
which it presumably came. Dying, of course, does not consist of us actually doing
anything, and so it is not really a way of Being, but in fact the opposite — the end of us
doing anything, the end of us as we know ourselves, the end of our Being as we know
it.

The thought of our imminent death is profoundly unsettling for most of us. So
disturbing, in fact, that, though we may catch authentic glimpses of it periodically, we
have a tendency, Heidegger argues, to flee back into the world of things, to fall back
into the world of the they-self, to talk about death in the abstract as an ‘event’ that
‘happens’ to ‘people’ — always ‘other people’. Though we insist that yes, we realize that
we too will also die, we usually also insist that this will only happen ‘one day’, ‘in the
future’, ‘no time soon’, when in fact death “is possible at any moment.” This characterizes
what Heidegger calls ‘inauthentic’ Being-towards-death.

Facing the fact of our imminent death authentically — being held out into the nothing
and not fleeing from it but, rather, facing it resolutely — is to anticipate our imminent
death, which is to say come to a full understanding and realization of our “ownmost
and uttermost potentiality-for-Being — that is to say, the possibility of authentic
existence.”

Confronting our imminent death in this way, for Heidegger, constitutes “freedom
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towards death”; though anxious, we are “released from the Illusions of the ‘they’” and

thus certain of our true selves. Only in such authentic Being-towards-death can we
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discover our true selves and free ourselves from the they-self. This is not to say free
ourselves from our attachments to the people and things of the world that concern us,
but to help us relate to the people and things of our world more authentically, to exist
more authentically. “Only by Being-their-Selves in resoluteness,” Heidegger writes,
“can people authentically be with one another — not by ambiguous and jealous
stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the ‘they’ and in what ‘they’ want to
undertake.”

But what calls us to authentic Being-towards-death? “Being-towards-death is essentially

anxiety,” Heidegger writes. Inauthentic Being-towards-death, as we have seen, is when,
in the face of the anxiety produced by becoming aware of the fact of our imminent
death, we flee back into the world of the they-self. Authentic Being-towards- death, by
contrast, is when, through the anxiety that is Being-towards-death, we do not flee back
into the world of the they-self, but rather stand firmly in anticipation of our own death
and choose, as terrifying as it may seem, to be ourselves.

But what is this anxiety? It is none other than our conscience revealing to us, in perfect
silence, our lostness in the they. Through anxiety, which, in contrast to fear, has no
object, we feel the true weight of the mystery of Being, experiencing a profound sense
of being out of place in the world, as a result of the experience of what Heidegger calls
the “uncanniness,” or perhaps eeriness, of Dasein’s being thrown into the world. Since
this process of the disclosure of our lostness in the they is the result of anxiety we
ourselves experience, our conscience is simply the call of our true self to our Dasein in
its lostness, and as such constitutes Dasein revealing itself to itself.

The purpose of this revealing, of course, is to call us to authentic existence, to an

authentic understanding of Being-towards-death. This, in turn, will allow us to face
death head-on, recognize the true significance of the finitude of life, and so claim our
true Being through acting not according to the they-self, but our true selves.

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