Toward a political ontology of Being and time: inauthenticity and authenticity

Abstract

This thesis examines the claim that the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time necessarily leads to an authoritarian politics. Using the arguments of Jurgen Habermas and Richard Wolin, I examine the contention that Heidegger's dichotomy between "authenticity" and "inauthenticity" is essentially a normative distinction between good and bad, serving to irrevocably split the social world into classes of leaders and followers. Against this, I argue that distinction between “authenticity” and "inauthenticity" is ethically neutral and therefore has no necessary political momentum in any direction.

Heidegger's critics argue that Being and Time reflects an "ideologically tinged worldview" that deems everyday social understandings and interaction as worthless "inauthenticity" obstructing the realization of our true "authentic" essence. With no positive valuation of the common social practices that any democratic political framework deems essential, "authenticity" leads inextricably to a detached and arbitrary elitism amenable to an authoritarian politics.

I argue, however, that "inauthenticity" embodies a range of positive as well as negative phenomena from which "authenticity" can never extricate itself. Instead of representing a dichotomization of the social body, the split between "authenticity" and "inauthenticity” is an ethically neutral distinction between the awareness and non-awareness of the self. Contrary to the critics' arguments, "authentic" self-awareness is not the repudiation of our everyday social world, but instead is contingent upon how we go about our everyday social projects. Thus, lacking the totalizing critique of our everyday social world and common understandings, Heidegger's existential analytic is better understood as a normatively neutral philosophical perspective that does not necessarily lead in any political or ethical direction.