On living authentically
Are you ‘human being’ the noun? Or human ‘being’ the verb?
I have been reading on Continental Philosophy since last year out of sheer fascination. (Though, surely it is not just fascination for fascination’s sake. But an elaboration on this topic would require a separate blog post so I will shelve this thought for now.) While my progress has been at a glacial pace (to be fair, I have a life to live and getting a grasp of Continental Philosophy is not exactly a walk in the park), I would read books every now and then, and browse some instructive videos on YouTube.
During one of these searches, I stumbled upon a video of an introductory discussion of Husserl, Phenomenology, Heidegger, and Existentialism with Hubert Dreyfus and Bryan Magee from 1987.
In the video, Magee and Dreyfus contextualized Heidegger’s groundbreaking philosophy by initially looking ito Husserl’s system of thought which represents the West’s traditional approach to philosophy — i.e., Descartes and the philosophers that succeeded him thought of us, human beings, as “subjects relating to objects”, that we stand far apart from the all that surrounds us. (Surely a factor for the Western culture’s excessive individualism.) A major consequence of these traditional notions on philosophy is that epistemological issues have taken the centerstage in the field which Heidegger bemoaned.
For the brilliant German philosopher, epistemology, albeit part of it, is not central to the human condition. We are not subjects inside a glass house, observing an objective reality beyond our ‘transparent’ walls. As Magee perfectly pointed out in the discussion, “we are, from the beginning, in amongst it all. We are in there in the world, so to speak, coping with it.”
There are no glass walls. Human condition is what Heidegger refers to as being-in-the-world; human beings integrally connected with the world through our skillful “coping” with it.
“We are not primarily observing or knowing beings at all in the way that traditional philosophers have treated us as being,” Magee noted. “We’re coping beings. We are ‘being’ beings.” And, for Heidegger, this is where we must begin towards understanding ourselves in the world. We must first ask what it means to be before even questioning the being-ness of the world.
So, what does living authentically have to do with this?
I will try to explain it as simply but clearly and substantively as I can based on the discussion and some of my very limited prior knowledge on Heidegger’s philosophy which is nothing less than a mindfuck.
For traditional philosophers, human beings are subjects constantly in observance of the objects that surround them, actively seeking knowledge, the truth, or whatever it is that we aim to find. But what Heidegger found curious about us was that, in actuality, we are not really conscious when performing most of our activities, especially practical ones.
As Dreyfus mentioned:
He (Heidegger) said to his students, when you come into the classroom you must turn the doorknob, but you don’t observe the doorknob, believe that you have to turn the doorknob to get in, try to turn the doorknob. All we know is, here you are in a classroom and you couldn’t have got here without turning the doorknob. You have no memory of it because the whole activity was so transparent it didn’t even pass through consciousness. A driver has the same experience shifting from first to second, they do a lot of fancy footwork with the clutch, but they can be carrying on a deep philosophical conversation, it doesn’t even have to be conscious.
This seems trivial and mundane, but why is this thought very important? Because it illustrates that our activities or ‘choices’ do not usually constitute conscious decision-making or awareness. And this is of great significance because it raises questions on freedom, free will, and the facticity of our agency as individuals.
Indeed, Magee asks a rather disquieting question: “If one does what one does or lives the way one does because that is how we are socially conditioned and we have to do it for the most part, then doesn’t that rather reduce the human agent to a sort of zombie — somebody who is merely responding to pressures on him from outside in an unreflecting way?”
This is where the subject of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) comes in.
For Heidegger, an authentic person — a Dasein (being there) — in contrast to an inauthentic person — das Man (the They) — is first and foremost, from what I understand, a nihilist, which is the belief that life is inherently meaningless. As Dreyfus puts it:
A Dasein, according to Heidegger, any Dasein anywhere, is always dimly aware that the way the world is ungrounded — by that I mean: there’s no reason why one has to do things this way. It isn’t because it’s rational to do things this way, it isn’t because God ordered us to do things this way, it isn’t because human nature requires we do them this way.
He added:
…the essence of Dasein is its existence, meaning there is no human nature. We are what we take ourselves to be, how we interpret ourselves in our practices.
Such thoughts are unsettling because they strip one off of any raison d’etre or, perhaps, an identity to hold on to which serves as the fulcrum for all his succeeding decisions. Thus, anxiety becomes an essential experience, a disposition of being Dasein.
A scene from the TV show Girls perfectly illustrates such experience. Marnie Michaels, one of the main characters, broke up with her boyfriend and was downsized from her job as an art gallerist. As someone who was used to living her life with a great degree of sureness, the abolition of her identity as a girlfriend and a gallerist throws her into an existential crisis. While contempating her life on a rooftop overlooking the vibrant skyline of New York City, Marnie exclaims to her ex-boyfriend:
I don’t know what the next year of my life is gonna be like at all. I don’t know what the next week of my life is gonna be like. I don’t even know what I want. Sometimes I just wish someone would tell me, like, this is how you should spend your days and this is how the rest of your life should look.
But then the next question arises: what does one do with such anxiety?
One option, as Heidegger suggests, is to flee it; escape being Dasein and become inauthentic (Uneigentlichkeit) — a das Man. This means going back to conformity and trying even harder to shape oneself up to the norms like dressing the right way, pronouncing things the right way and everything.
And then there’s the other way, which is to “own up to what it is to be Dasein.” Dreyfus said:
“To own up” means for Heidegger to hold on to anxiety and not flee it. And if you do that, you will be catapulted into an entirely different way of being human.
But this is the important part of the discussion, at least for me. There is an extent where one could overdo trying to be authentic and, in the process, risk being inauthentic. As Jean-Paul Sartre, another existentialist, quipped once: “If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake, then you are no longer authentic.” This idea reminds me of all those popstars and celebrities trying to be different and unique all for authenticity’s sake. For Heidegger, that is as worse inauthenticity itself.
So how do we ensure that our authenticity remains authentic? Here’s what Dreyfus thinks about Heidegger’s idea of authenticity:
Now, what you do needn’t change because you only can do what one does or you’ll just be kooky and insane. So you go on doing probably the same thing you did, but how you do it changes completely. You no longer expect to get any deep final meaning out of anything. So you don’t embrace projects with the conviction that now, at last, this is gonna make sense of your life. And you also don’t then drop all your projects because they fail to make the ultimate meaning you’re looking for. As one of my students once said, you are able to stick with things without getting stuck with them.
Dreyfus proceeds to give a more concrete example:
Take his carpenter that he’s (Heidegger) always talking about with his hammer. When he puts his hammer down for lunch, he could just have his sausages and sauerkraut, but if there’s beautiful flowers blooming outdoors and he’s authentic, he doesn’t have to do what a respectable carpenter does, he can go out and wander in the flowers. But it’s important that he can do only what one does. He can’t take off all his clothes and roll in the flowers, one doesn’t do that.
It seems to me that Heideggerian authenticity is not a general principle nor a guideline of living one’s life. It’s not a one-size-fits-all virtue that we passively or unreflectingly implement in our lives. Authenticity is how we respond to unique situations “without concern for respectability in conformity.”
For Heidegger, a Dasein lives in the moment and does not demand absolute meaning from all his activities. Such situation makes one an authentic individual who is flexible and truly alive. For the German philosopher, this is how one should live. And by accepting the “ungroundedness” and meaninglessness of being Dasein; that anxiety is a normal part of existence which we must accept and not run away from, is the first step toward authenticity and personal liberation.
P.S.
I am far from being a Heideggerian scholar. If anyone in a better position finds anything erroneous in this piece, please feel free to correct my misreadings.
