"…Dasein is 'proximally and mostly' not alongside itself but out there alongside in business and alongside the others.

Proximally it is not 'I,' in the sense of my own Self, that 'am,' but rather the Others, whose way is that of the 'they'…Proximally Dasein is 'they,' and for the most part it remains so. If Dasein discovers the world in its own way [eigens] and brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery of the ‘world’ and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way. (SuZ, 129)

We already know one moment when 'disguises' break up and authentic Being discloses itself-the moment of anxiety. The world loses its significance, it appears as a naked ‘that’ against the background of nothingness, and Dasein experiences itself as a homeless, unguarded and unguided by any objective Being. The breakthrough to authentic Being thus takes place as a contingency shock, as the experience of 'there is nothing behind it.' Even more clearly than in Being and Time, Hediegger formulated this initiation experience for a philosophy of authenticity in his Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1929. Philosophy, he then said, only begins when we have the courage to 'let nothingness encounter us.' Eye to eye with nothing, we then observe not only that we are 'something' real, but also that we are creative creatures, capable of letting something emerge from nothing. The decisive point is that man can experience himself as the place where nothing becomes something and something becomes nothing. Anxiety leads us to this turning point. It confronts us with the 'being possible' that we are ourselves.

Heidegger's analysis of anxiety expressly does not have fear of death as its subject. It would be more correct to say that its subject is fear of life, of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency. Anxiety reveals that everyday life is fleeting from its contingency. That is the meaning of all attempts to firmly root oneself in life.

One might assume that They are only Everyman, but they are also the philosophers. Because these, Heidegger remarks critically, firmly root themselves in their grand constructs, their worlds of values and metaphysical back-worlds. Philosophy, too, is for the most part busy removing the contingency shock or, better still, not admitting it in the first place.

And now to authenticity itself. It is the negation of negation. It resists the tendency to escape, to evade, Authenticity has made nothingness its own affair. Authenticity means being born again. Authenticity discovers no new areas of Dasein. Everything can, and probably will, remain as it was; only our attitude to it changes"(Safranski 1998:162-163).

Safranski, Rüdiger
1998[1994] Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Ewald Osers, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Citation Style AAA

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil at Amazon.com