“Demanding Authenticity of Ourselves”: Heidegger on Authenticity as an Extra-Moral Ideal

Abstract

Heidegger clearly considers authenticity to be some sort of ideal, however the relationship between authenticity as an ideal and other ideals is less than clear. There are three general approaches to dealing with the conflict between authenticity and moral or ethical ideals, which I identify as the existentialist, transcendentalist, and historicist approaches. These views struggle to reconcile three features of Heidegger’s account of authenticity as an extra moral ideal. First is the claim that authenticity is independent of, and not subservient to, moral ideals. Second is the claim that we become essentially human only when we are authentic. And third is the claim that existential guilt (which we take up resolutely in authenticity) grounds the possibility of being morally good or morally evil. I shall argue that none of these views correctly captures the immediate relevance authenticity bears to moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. In this paper, I want to show how we can do justice to all three theses. I’ll start by offering a more detailed analysis of the fundamental distinctions that tacitly structure Heidegger’s account of authenticity as an ideal (section “Authenticity as an Ideal”). The structural account of authenticity that emerges will allow us to say more clearly how authenticity relates to other human ideals (section “Authenticity and Morality: Conflicts and Hierarchies”).

This paper was written as a companion piece to “Autonomy, Authenticity, and the Self” (Wrathall forthcoming), and in some instances presupposes arguments I made in that article. I have had the chance to work through different elements in my interpretation of Heidegger’s account of selfhood, guilt and authenticity in a variety of settings, including presentations at the annual meeting of the American Society for Existential Phenomenology, the Seminar on Selfhood, Authenticity and Method in Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 2 sponsored by the British Academy, the History of Philosophy Workshop held at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, the University of New Mexico, Claremont Graduate University, the annual meeting of the Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, and at Ungründe: Perspektiven Prekärer Fundierung, a conference sponsored by the Freie Universität Berlin, at the 2013 meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, at the Philosophy Forum at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, at the Philosophy Department Colloquium at California State University Northridge, at the Post-Kantian Seminar in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, at the Institutskolloquium at the University of Potsdam, the 2014 meeting of the Heidegger Circle, and the Griffith Lecture at George Washington University. I’ve benefitted from numerous discussions, questions, and challenges posed to the interpretation on offer here, and I’m grateful to all those people who participated in these events. Among the many who have helped me think through these issues, several are deserving of special acknowledgment, including Daniel Dahlstrom, Wayne Martin, Taylor Carman, Samantha Matherne, Justin White, Beatrice Han-Pile, Iain Thomson, David Cerbone, Charles Siewert, Denis McManus, Julian Young, Megan Flocken, Kaity Creasy, Joseph Spencer, John Fischer, Ben Mitchell-Yellin, Bill Bracken, Miguel de Beistegui, Stephen Houlgate, Hans-Peter Krüger, and Steve Crowell.