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A DEFENSE OF 'INAUTHENTIC DASEIN'

A better idea of what Heidegger means by 'inauthentic' and 'authentic' dasein can perhaps be had from the discussion in the Introduction to Metaphysics of a passage in Sophocles' play Antigone(23) The passage in question is the choral ode usually translated 'Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man' (Heidegger never seems to stray very far from well-beaten paths. One imagines that if ever he deigned to notice a speech in Shakespeare it would have to be 'To be or not to be'). In its usual rendition the chorus marvels at all the daring and adventurous things man does, then comes to the fact that some men overstep the mark and behave in an anti-social manner, finally declaring that they themselves hope never to entertain such men under the roofs of their houses:

  O wondrous subtlety of man, that draws
To good or evil ways! Great honour is given
And power to him who upholdeth his country's laws
    And the justice of heaven.
  But he that, too rashly daring, walks in sin
In solitary pride to his life's end
At door of mine shall never enter in
    To call me friend.
(24)

(23) Martin Heidegger: Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2014 (2nd ed) pp.163 et seq. The lectures were originally given in 1935 and first published in German in 1953.

(24) Sophocles: The Theban Plays, translated by E.F.Watling, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978 (1st ed 1947), p.136.

In the context of the Antigone story in which Antigone has just been arrested for fulfilling what might be regarded as God's law (giving her brother a proper burial) in defiance of man's law (since the brother was a rebel who had led an army against his own city), this version is already replete with irony - even more so if we think of the overall context of the story of Oedipus (which would have been known to the audience though the play was not yet written) in which Oedipus is the ultimate social outcast, the man who has killed his father and had children, including Antigone and her brother, by his mother.

Heidegger's version, however, is still more remarkable. Instead of the bland word 'wonder' he has the very Heideggerian word unheimlich, usually translated 'uncanny', and where the conventional version counterposes the many wonderful and courageous things men do with the doings of the 'wicked' man to whom the chorus wish to refuse their hospitality, Heidegger has the wicked man just as a passing example of the many types of uncanniness and it is the uncanny man, the one who performs all these marvels, who is refused hospitality by the chorus:

Clever indeed, for he masters
skill's devices beyond expectation,
now he falls prey to wickedness,
yet again valour succeeds for him.
Between the ordinance of the earth and the
gods' sworn fittingness he fares.
Rising high over the site, losing the site
is he for whom what is not is, always,
for the sake of daring.
Let him not become a companion at my hearth,
nor let my knowing share the delusions
of the one who works such deeds.

On this reading, the chorus represent inauthentic dasein - safe, comfortable, conventional, content with appearances, with doxa (opinion), homely (heimlich) - as against authentic dasein, represented as uncanny ie unheimlich, outside the bounds of the homely, but nonetheless the place of truth, understood not as a correct alignment of statement and fact but as an unconcealing, a revelation - 'the one who is violence-doing, the creative one, who sets out into the un-said, who breaks into the un-thought, who compels what has never happened and makes appear what is unseen, this violence-doing one stands at all time in daring. Insofar as he dares the conquest of Being, he must risk the assault of un-beings, the me kalon [not good or beautiful - PB], disintegration, un-constancy, un-fittingness' (p.180). 

This could be said to be quite often the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy - inauthentic dasein (you and me, the audience) watching in horror the unfolding of authentic dasein, the heroic figure thrown out of the circle of the homely, the sociable. And on this reading isn't it interesting that tragedians should put so much of their best poetry into the mouths of inauthentic dasein?

In the Spiegel interview Heidegger says: 'As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition.' And the word unheimlich - uncanny - is used to characterise the 'technicity' which 'increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth.' Heidegger's broad thesis is that philosophy's long reflection on 'Being' has resulted in the triumph of technicity to the extent that we are now so uprooted from the earth that we can, again following the Spiegel interview, take a photo of the earth from outer space, an achievement that fills him with horror. It appears then that the essential things of great magnitude have finished by destroying the home and the tradition that were the necessary condition for their existence. And am I being perverse in interpreting this as a triumph of authentic dasein over inauthentic dasein?

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