https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/ (SEP)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_(philosophy)
is authenticity equal to opening up to the world ?
Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit)
Dasein relates to its being as the possibility that belongs to it more than anything else does, and yet as something it is capable of losing or attaining. Authenticity and inauthenticity are modes of being that are grounded in the fact that each Dasein is its own respective possibility (SZ 42f, 53, 232). While Dasein is initially and for the most part inauthentic, having lost or not yet found itself, authentic existence modifies—without detaching itself from—the They (SZ 128, 130, 175–9, 181). In its absorption in the They, Dasein turns away from itself and flees its authentic capability of being (fleeing, too, the angst that reveals its freedom to choose itself, i.e. to be authentic or inauthentic) (SZ 184–8, 191). Dasein’s disclosure of itself with respect to what is most its own is the “authentic disclosure,” showing “the phenomenon of the most primordial truth in the mode of authenticity” (SZ 221).
The possibility that Dasein shares with nothing else and that is most its own is its death, the possibility of its impossibility. Authentically relating to this possibility is not evading but anticipating it. Anticipating death as our defining possibility discloses our finitude but also enables us to become free for it and, hence, free to understand and choose authentically among finite, factical possibilities. Breaking the hold of any obdurate identification with possibilities either previously attained or awaited, it also guards against being with others inauthentically, by way of either mistaking their possibilities for ours or foisting our possibilities upon them. Arousing us from the inertia of merely conforming, resolutely anticipating death brings us face to face with the possibility of being ourselves, each on his or her own in a “freedom for death,” unsupported by anything we undertake with one another. In the German term translated as “authenticity,” namely Eigentlichkeit, lies the root term for “own” (eigen), and, indeed, to be authentic is precisely to own up to oneself, not least, as a “being towards death” (SZ 259–66).
Conscience attests to this authentic capability, calling Dasein to take responsibility for itself in the wake of its existential guilt, namely, the fact that, while not responsible for being here, it is singularly responsible for choosing certain possibilities over others. In contrast to an existence completely absorbed in the They, an authentic existence listens to itself, to the call of its conscience. To understand the call of conscience, listening to it without distortion, is to want to have a conscience or, equivalently, resoluteness. Resoluteness is the “authentic disclosedness to which Dasein’s conscience attests in itself” (SZ 297).
Before we have even come of age, we have fallen prey to forces of assimilation. We seemingly make choices all the time, but it is not clear that we are doing any more than going through the motions since the choices are made under the sway of some group (the They). In other words, we have not really chosen to choose but instead enacted choices that we expect are expected of us, accommodating and inhabiting shared perspectives just because they are shared. In order to make choices in an authentic way, it is necessary for us to make choices conscientiously, i.e. on the basis of who we are as someone with the responsibility of making them—and remaking or retracting them, precisely in view of the possibility of our impossibility. To choose to choose in this conscientious way (or, equivalently, to want to have a conscience) is to be resolute—and to be resolute is to exist authentically (SZ 336).
There is a distinctive transparency and constancy to being authentic, to assuming responsibility for ourselves concretely (ontically). “The more authentically Dasein is resolute … the more unambiguously and non-contingently does it find and choose the possibility of its existence. Only anticipating death drives out any contingent and ‘provisional’ possibility. Only being-free for death, provides Dasein the goal in an unqualified way and plunges existence into its finitude” (SZ 384, 305). With finitude comes the possibility of “taking back” or “giving up” any specific resolution (SZ 264, 308, 391). To be resolute in a manner that anticipates death is to come back repeatedly to oneself and one’s factical situation (“dependent upon a ‘world’ and existing with others”), disclosing the respective possibilities of the situation “on the basis of the legacy” that one takes over in being thrown into the world (SZ 383; 64: 117, 122f).
One challenge for Heidegger’s treatment of authenticity is accounting for the basis of the choice, even as it chooses to choose. If that basis, e.g. some reason or belief, is drawn from the averageness of everyday Dasein, then the authenticity of the choice seems questionable. Some interpreters countenance this enabling role of average everydayness in Dasein’s capacity to be authentic, while others contend that the authentic choice to choose prescinds from any such norm, thereby inviting the charge of decisionism. Both approaches are problematic. The former seems to violate the indexicality of Dasein’s authentic choice, i.e. the fact that its choice to choose is made in view of its projection of its death, not shared with any other Dasein. The latter approach renders authenticity an unmotivated spontaneity, a kind of moral luck.
In Heidegger’s later writings he returns briefly to the theme of authenticity, as the center of gravity shifts from existential analysis to thinking being historically as the appropriating event. In this context authenticity is “the origin of the historical selfhood of the human being. Appropriated into the truth of historical being, the human being is now itself a human being.” The crucial difference is whether the human being is responsive to that truth, responsibly corresponding to it, or pursues some self-made task stemming from a metaphysical-anthropological, willful subjectivity in the form of an “I” or “we” (71: 154–61).
Dahlstrom, Daniel O.. The Heidegger Dictionary (Bloomsbury Philosophy Dictionaries) (Kindle location 600-647). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle edition.
