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Christianity, Heidegger and Inauthenticity
Kevin Sludds
REA: A Journal of Religion, Education and the Arts, Issue 8, 2011, http://rea.materdei.ie/
1. Dasein’s Inauthenticity or Man Living Without Faith
In an effort to draw direct and immediate attention to the dichotomies
highlighted by both New Testament writers and Martin Heidegger in Being
and Time1 when describing one‟s/Dasein‟s constitution, the title of this article
is deliberately paradoxical. There are a number of core dichotomies
referenced in these writings: the human vs. the natural, light vs. darkness,
salvation vs. damnation, authenticity vs. inauthenticity, facticity vs. possibility,
present-at-hand vs. ready-to-hand. Though Heidegger‟s goal was to lay bare
the meaning of Being in general, there remains little balance between facticity
and possibility, that is, between Dasein as thrown already-in-the-world and
Dasein as projecting-understanding ahead-of-itself. John Macquarrie remarks
that because of this, „Man‟s possibility in the grip of facticity is hopeless, and
the estimate of Heidegger‟s thought as a philosophy of despair seems just‟
(Macquarrie 1955, 82).
From a religious perspective, of course, we see a
clear escape from these points of opposition; for from facticity „the Lord God
formed man of the dust of the ground‟ and from possibility „breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life‟ (Gen. 2.7); both then become conjoined within the
unitary ground of God‟s Being. It is little surprise that St. Paul could so
succinctly write of the limits of man‟s ontic capacity to comprehend his Being:
„For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in
my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into
captivity to the law of sin which is in my members‟ (Rom. 7.22-23).
The Christian analysis of fallenness at the ontic level is set out in such
a way that it is considered elemental to humankind‟s constitution and so
should not be dismissed as insignificant. Sinfulness is nothing less than a
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falling away from himself by humans; a re-orientation away from his
authentic Being2 or a movement away from God the Creator and a turning
towards creatures (i.e. towards the world). In the New Testament one‟s
fundamental condition is detailed in terms of this type of sinfulness, „since all
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God‟ (Rom. 3.23). St. Paul again
offers a clear statement on how man can be alienated from himself through
sin, „So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin dwells within me‟ (Rom. 7.17),
an inauthentic self that can only be such because man, at his core, finds his
Being is an issue for him. Alienation from the self is alienation from God, for
to „set the mind on the flesh [i.e. the carnal mind] is death, but to set the
mind on the Spirit is life and peace‟ (Rom. 8.6).
As an individual has, in the structure of his or her Being, the possibility
of an inauthentic being-with-others, his or her fallen state of sinfulness is
called in the New Testament „the world‟
3
(the manifestation of this possibility
in BT is called das Man). One‟s‟s/Dasein‟s unique character means that it does
not exist as other living entities or inanimate objects exist, that is, present inthe-world. Rather it stands out, transcending the subject-object dichotomy.
Dasein finds itself not as an object in-the-world but as attuned where it has to
be among the littered a priori givens of such things as nationality, intelligence
and sex. These givens, that are taken on in existence are called facticity,
which means not merely the factum brutum of what is but a way in which
things already matter to Dasein and on which it depends for its objects and
for its possibilities as its way of Being-in-the-world. Heidegger‟s existential
analytic mirrors the New Testament description in the following ways: firstly,
humans are living a fallen existence which is valueless. They consider
themselves masters of their destiny, a conceit stemming from the pride they
have in their own ontic achievements; secondly, such an existence is one
where they have lost themselves in the flesh or lost themselves in
inauthenticity and, thirdly, both approaches recognise the need for conversion
or transition. The term „resoluteness‟ (Entschlossenheit)4 is used in BT to
convey this radical transition from inauthenticity to authenticity; the shift from
how Angst is perceived as threatening and from which one flees, to an
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acceptance of Dasein‟s nullity and death as a structural component of its way
of Being.
Naturally a Christian reading of the counter-point to inauthenticity is
distinct from a Heideggerian one. Though it too leads to a quest, it is a search
that points humans in the direction of God, to the revealed Word of God in
Jesus Christ, a belief in whom eradicates all uncertainties - for even death is
„swallowed up in victory‟ (Cor. 15.54). Authenticity in this respect is based on
a belief that humans are formed in the image of God (John 10.10); their
original (ursprünglich) possibility being to be children of God, a state which
the Church maintains it helps in restoring when humans have fallen away
from God. In a secular sense, Heidegger claims his existential analytic assists
in developing an authentic stance when faced with our inexorable death:
„Inauthenticity denotes a way of being in which man may go astray, and
generally does go astray, but in which he need not necessarily and always go
astray‟ (Heidegger 1992, 259). However, the Christian response has an
explicit soteriological message of hope while Heidegger‟s response appears a
diagnosis of despair. For our not „go[ing] astray‟ is defined only in negative
terms, our not being inauthentic; authenticity then being a phantom concept,
so to speak, existing merely as a means of describing what is not, retaining
none of the promise of religious faith and hope.
2. Primordial Thinking and Phenomenology
Dasein‟s/one‟s way of Being-in-the-world is not founded on its ontic
understanding of the world but on its ontological care for its place in-theworld. It is our moods not our theoretical or calculative thinking that
orientates us, and it is our moods and not our emotions that concerns
Heidegger5. Living a merely concernful-solicitous existence is to live only at
the ontic level and, from a religious perspective, to live without God is sinful.
Moods help in the building of a fundamental ontology by remaining rooted in
a „basic experience of the “object” to be disclosed‟ (Heidegger 1992, 232),
and attuning us to the world and not simply to emotions or what Heidegger
calls „fleeting Experiences‟ (Heidegger 1992, 390): „attunement . . . has so
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little to do with a kind of apprehending that first turns around and turns back
on itself, that only because the „there‟ has already been disclosed in
attunement can inward-turning reflection come across “experience” at all‟
(Heidegger 1992, 136).
In the first half of the twentieth century existentialist philosophers in
general, and Heidegger in particular6, were reacting against the modernist
age of scientific humanism that existed. They were deeply unhappy with the
notion that theoretical knowledge was in some way privileged; in fact,
Heidegger considered it subordinate to primordial or essential, factical
knowledge. Against this modernist movement Edmund Husserl recognised
such scientific positivism could never reach the point of, metaphorically,
putting man‟s experiences of the self under the microscope. For reason alone
is insufficient to adduce ontological results and so it was to a sensitive and
intimate description of the phenomena themselves that he returned.
Heidegger tells us that phenomenology pinpoints, firstly, the phenomenon or
that which „shows itself‟ or „allows itself be seen‟ for what it is and, secondly,
the logos (which as speech) is also a showing. This method is „not one of
“proof”; rather, it is one of description, wherein it is hoped that others will see
things the same way‟ (Lauer 1965, 85). In BT it is the method that is directed
to Being; the Being which is disclosed to Dasein in its primordial grasp of
itself. Paul Tillich noted how, from a theological perspective, we must:
apply the phenomenological approach to all its basic concepts, forcing its
critics first of all to see what the criticized concepts mean, and also forcing
itself to make careful descriptions of its concepts and to use them with logical
consistency, thus avoiding the danger of trying to fill in logical gaps with
devotional material. The test of a phenomenological description is that the
picture given by it is convincing . . . [and] makes the reality which these
ideas are supposed to reflect understandable (Tillich 1975, 118).
Heidegger‟s philosophy describes Dasein in respect of its Being while in
theology man is described in relation to God. In what was published as
Supplements, Heidegger, some years before BT, outlined Martin Luther‟s
theological starting point as being: „seized by horror that is based in quarere
iustitiam suam [seeking his righteousness]. There thus arises desperatio
51
spiritualis [spiritual despair], despair before God . . . because of the affectus
horrens peccatum [affect of being horrified at sin]‟ (Heidegger 2002, 106).
Heidegger too takes as his starting point our factical life where, as I
will show, cognition holds no higher status7 than mood. Luther‟s referencing
of our factical life experience as corrupt heavily influenced Heidegger‟s
description of quotidian
Dasein‟s
(das
Man‟s/the „theys‟) inauthentic
(incurious) comportment and the importance of making us aware of this
reality. As we will see, it is our affective capacity to disrupt our everyday
concernful-solicitous activities that is akin to Luther‟s consideration of the
Word of God to „pluck up and to break down, to destroy [destruas] and to
overthrow‟ (Luther 1972, 136).
The word aware is a little misleading, for
Heidegger does not mean a type of knowing or any other cognitive-laden
concept, but an attunement understood as an orientation where, „Dasein is
always brought before itself, and has always found itself, not in the sense of
coming across itself by perceiving itself, but in the sense of finding itself in
the mood that it has‟ (Heidegger 1992, 174). Primordial mood is the disclosive
backdrop against which specific moods and emotions play out their roles.
Though moods orientate us we often do not recognise their presence, and
individual moods, such as irritation or cheerfulness emerge out of primordial
mood that reveals our world into which such phenomena play their part.
Understood in this way, mood is Dasein‟s means of most fundamentally
grasping that it is.
Heidegger begins his analysis from Dasein‟s most distinct position of
Being-in-the-world and Being with-others; only because Dasein is concernfully
in-the-world is it that one‟s self can be summoned to its „capacity-to-be‟
(Seinkönnen). This term „capacity-to-be‟ is translated by Macquarrie and
Robinson as „potentiality-for-Being‟ but this is misleading since, as Dreyfus
points out, „können signifies a know-how, not just a potentiality‟ (Dreyfus
1991, xi). The call of conscience brings Dasein face to face with its own
unsettledness, and as the entity that has been thrown into being a self, it is
summoned to become an authentic self. In existentially interpreting what the
summons calls us to, no specific possibility of Dasein can be bracketed-off.
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What is not summoned is the existentially individual understanding of what
Dasein is but what belongs to the existential condition (or the general
characteristics of Dasein) for the possibility of its factical-existentiell capacityto-be. Despite the importance of Dasein‟s Being-in-the-world and Being with
others, to grasp its own being summoned to it must be free of the distorted
noise of the „they‟. At the factical concernful-solicitous level an authentic
understanding of the summons is not always grasped, Dasein is not given
information regarding its concernful dealings in-the-world or „directions‟ to
guide its questioning. The caller remains unconcretised and simply brings
Dasein before its capacity-to-be. Dasein is then summoned from its fallenness
(its „they‟-self) to its mineness, to its possibility for individualisation and its
basic „sense‟ of unsettledness is disclosed (i.e. its „from where‟ as thrown
Being-there). As Dasein‟s daily life is absorption in the „they‟, such a
disclosure is essential if its authentic individualisation is to be made possible.
Dasein‟s „from where‟ is the very „where to‟ to which the summons brings it
back, so that it can stand up for itself and see itself as fallen.
Though Heidegger was concerned with the concept „fallenness‟
(Verfallenheit) from a purely ontological perspective, and so superficial
comparisons with the theological myth of the fall of humanity should be
avoided, one can still ask is he correct to believe that falling, being absorbed
in everyday concernful-solicitousness is a distancing of ourselves from our
authentic self? Is there not something deeply authentic about our very
inauthenticity, about das Man? Later in his life Heidegger described the
question of the meaning of Being by saying it is an issue for everyone, „each
of us is grazed at least once, perhaps more than once, by the hidden power
of this question, even if he is not aware of what is happening to him‟
(Heidegger 1973, 1). Is it not possible that we are „grazed‟ far more often
than Heidegger suggests? Consider the simple example of sitting on a tram,
during the morning rush-hour, in a foreign city. The make-up of the workaday
world suddenly made stark, wondrous, fearful and mysterious8. Yet to the
locals this hotchpotch of reality is banal, bland and often irritating. Surely it is
only by being inauthentic that the possibility of authenticity can emerge; just
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as mineness can only exist as a counter-point to they-ness, fallen-ness to
risen-ness, sinfulness to goodness and so on. Inauthenticity is a means of
defending Dasein against a reality too difficult to accept, as religion might be
considered another dimension to reality which transcends it.
It is important to remember that Heidegger‟s initial concern is to return
to the questions raised by the pre-Socratics, questions he believed had been
neglected by their successors. The fundamental question of what something
is, or what is meant by the being of something had almost become a nonquestion, not only for historians and scientists who considered it self-evident
or ineffable, but for philosophers and theologians who had lost contact with
its ontological significance. Of course, any questioning of Being is already
coloured by some faint grasp of what we are questioning. For if we were not
to know anything about our quarry, in a literal sense, that would amount to
our being in a state nescience: „For to know nothing is nothing‟ (Beckett 1955,
86), Molloy comments in the novel that takes his name, and the Fool in King
Lear observes, „Nothing comes from nothing‟ (Shakespeare 2002, 110). Not
to know anything about something cannot, then, lead to an ontological or any
other type of inquiry. To put it another way, if I know absolutely nothing
about music, let alone jazz, I cannot then assess the merits or otherwise of
listening to Louis Stewart, for to not know anything about jazz cannot then
create an evaluation that this very state of nescience is significant. However,
what Heidegger proposes is that the essential reality of our existence is
„known‟, intuited or sensed and, thus, our Being may indeed be inquired into.
Macquarrie notes that the very fact: „we continually use the verb “to be”
shows that from the outset we already stand in an understanding of what it
means to be, and yet this understanding, when we are challenged to say
what it is, turns out to be very vague and difficult to pin down‟ (Macquarrie
1968, 6). Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue
(Heidegger 1992, 236).
It was in Heidegger‟s account that the theologian Rudolf Bultmann saw
the possibility of clarifying the content of faith by using the insights
hammered out in BT. That which is implicit in Christian belief may be revealed
54
with the phenomenological tools developed by Heidegger. Yet, Heidegger‟s
sensitivity in crafting a phenomenology of facticity is itself indebted to his
reading of Christian theologians and biblical texts. And he recognised a
problem:
Theology is seeking a more primordial interpretation of the being of man in
relation to God, prescribed by the meaning of faith and remaining within it. It
is slowly beginning to understand once more Luther‟s insight, that its system
of dogma rests on a “foundation” which is not itself a matter of faith, and the
concepts of which are not only inadequate for theological problems, but
obscure and distort them (Heidegger 1992, 30).
Bultmann was aware of the need to heed Heidegger‟s warning
concerning the neglect of the question of Being and, though it seems fair to
say Heidegger‟s philosophy is existentially rooted, it is never anthropocentric,
never merely the analysis of „human‟ when that term is considered a synonym
for agent or existent but something far more profound, a search for the
meaning of Being in its totality. As we have seen, Dasein is given some sense
of its Being, some pre-theoretical foothold which Heidegger attempts to make
explicit in BT, and which Tillich believed was present, whether acknowledged
or not, in every theological inquiry:
Theology, when dealing with our ultimate concern, presupposes in every
sentence the structure of being, its categories [existentialia in BT], laws and
concepts. Theology, therefore, cannot escape the question of being any more
easily than can philosophy. The attempt of Biblicism to avoid non-biblical,
ontological terms is doomed to failure as surely as the corresponding
philosophical attempts (Tillich 1975, 24-5).
The most advantageous philosophical approach is one that carries in it
concepts subtle enough to capture, or at least confidently „hint at‟, those
elemental structures of Being given in human existence. Theologians such as
Bultmann considered their work to be chiefly as interpreters of the content of
faith and, consequently, read the Bible as a means of finding an answer to
the question of human existence. Naturally, questions concerning God can
only have relevance insofar as they impinge on human existence, for God‟s
Being, to talk of such a thing, is beyond the parameters of theology and,
indeed, beyond comprehension itself. This study starts from Dasein‟s
reflective openness to the question of deciding about its own Being. Certainly
55
for Tillich, such a quest does not mean that the ontological aspect of this
interpretation need develop into a full-blown philosophy of religion. Rather,
existential/ontological concepts act as conduits in elucidating the kernel of
Being which lie implicitly in the New Testament.
If one is made in the image of God9 one „cannot be submerged in
nature, or merged in the laws of the cosmos, so long as he remains true to
his destiny. The Creator‟s greatest gift to man, that of a personal “I”,
necessarily places him, in analogy with God‟s being, at a distance from nature‟
(Eichrodt 1951, 30). An onto-theological approach does not objectify humans
as if they were nothing other than a particularly complex entity to be made
explicable, as science explains other aspects of nature; rather it elevates the
personal „I‟ in the same manner to the biblical understanding of humans.
Earlier I wrote of das Man as the indefinite, anonymous they of our
everyday comportment Being-in-the-world and how, under its influence,
individual Dasein can come to blindly accept, and become lost, in the customs
and traditions that are handed-down to it. As thrown-facticity Dasein always
finds itself in a public „they‟-self world, „For the most part I myself am not the
“who” of Dasein; the they-self is its “who”‟ (Heidegger 1992, 312).
Dasein/one turns one‟s back on the need to grasp one‟sownmost potential
(SeinkÖnnen) for meaning and decide for oneself. We can see clear parallels
here with Jesus‟ cautioning, during the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5.21-22),
of uncritically following laws and traditions and, as a result, avoiding the
demands of becoming a person of faith (i.e. an authentic person). To do so
would require the rejection of the they-self and, by extension, the world
(Mark 8.36, Luke 15.17, Matt. 10.39), and deciding to choose God‟s path, to
find oneself by dismissing the superficial succour provided by the „they‟.
3. Being-in-the-world: One’s Relation to Oneself
Heidegger stresses the importance of not confusing Dasein‟s Being-in-theworld in some categorical sense as Being-in-something; for Dasein‟s Being-in
is the complete opposite of my being-in-a-kitchen while I write these words.
My being-in-a-kitchen cuts me off from being-in-the-living room or being-in-
56
the-street, but our ontological Being-in is an opening out into the world,
where to reside is an existential dwelling without boundaries; it is a
simultaneous opening to and absorption with and through the world to its
own possibilities. Dasein‟s way of Being-in-the-world is predicated on its Being
an issue for itself, that is, it has a particular and unique relation to itself. This
is the very reason why it can either „lose itself to the being that meets it in
the world, and be taken over by it‟ (Heidegger 1992, 76) or find itself
authentically.
According to St. John one is understood to be „not of the world‟ (John
17.16) yet in the world, though by this he does not mean one is within the
world (Innerweltlichkeit) as my car is within the world, that is, belongs to the
world. One‟s reflective openness to the question of deciding about one‟s own
Being means one can know oneself authentically or surrender to sin: „Let not
sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions‟
(Rom. 6.12). St. Paul emphasises how one can master oneself or lose
oneself10, „Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of
death‟ (Rom. 7.24). The three components of an individual, or existentialia of
the structure of Dasein, can be summarised as: a) one‟s existence is always
corporal, b) one always has a relation to oneself and, c) one can be either
unified or estranged from oneself.
Dasein‟s Being-in-the-world is ontologically significant as all of our ontic
tasks are linked, directly or potentially, to the task of Being itself. For
instance, the humble overcoat I wear on a winter‟s day for the protection of
Being; the Hummel figurine on my mantelpiece to my desire for aesthetic
pleasure; the computer keyboard to my attempt to communicate with others
as Being-with and so on. The world is the clearing of Dasein for the laying
bare of entities as what they are, for the Da of Dasein and the disclosedness
of the world are the same, and this clearing is what Heidegger calls a „sign‟.
In the practical context of equipment (Zeug), a sign „is something ontically
available, which functions both as this definite equipment and as something
indicative of the ontological structures of availableness, of referential wholes,
and of worldliness‟ (Heidegger 1992, 114). A sign does not reveal the single
57
piece of equipment but the interconnected complex of patterns into which
equipment is integrated. It functions as „an item of equipment which explicitly
raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it
the worldly character of the ready-to-hand announces itself‟ (Heidegger 1992,
110).
The world is that instrumental interconnected totality that coheres
understood in relation to one‟s practical concernful-solicitous comportment
and a threat to Dasein‟s authentic existence; a potential veil of its Being by
the mere being of what is within the world. In a similar way the New
Testament word for the world is „creation‟ and, for St. Paul, this term has the
twofold meaning: 1) the creation is the work of God for human‟s use: „And
the Lord God planted a garden in Eden . . . and there he put the man whom
he had formed‟ (Gen. 2.8 cf. Ps. 8.6); and 2) the creation can also be
threatening: „We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail
together until now . . . [because humans have] exchanged the truth about
God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator‟
(Rom. 8.22 and 1.25). One must decide to either lose oneself in the creation
or save oneself in the Creator. The parallels with Heideggerian possibilities are
overt.
As we have seen, Being-in-the-world is not only a reference to the
ontic fact of Being-alongside entities but the ontologically key fact of our
Being as Being-with. For the individual should not be considered an isolated
factual entity but a factical thrown Being whose Being-with characterises care
as that system of meaning which coheres. The „shared forms of life‟ of our
given community, society and culture means we are attuned to one another
in our dealings in-the-world and manipulate equipment as „they‟ do, revealing
our competence to grasp the mores, rules and regulations of these very
communities, societies and cultures. The Dasein-with of others belongs to
Being-with since: „the worldhood of the world, in which Dasein essentially is
already . . . lets us encounter what is environmentally ready-to-hand as
something with which we can be concerned in our know-how, and it does so
58
in such a way together with it we encounter the Dasein-with of others‟
(Heidegger 1992, 160).
Dasein-with refers, then, to the way Dasein manifests its grasping of
the public roles it plays that are understood by others in our shared world.
Being-in-the-world is an existentiale of Dasein, as being-within-the-world is a
category of, for instance, Fido running around in the park or my golf clubs in
the boot of my car. Any notion of Dasein as isolated or solipsistic is false, for
Dasein simply is its meaningful actions in-the-world.
4. Angst11 as a Primordial Mood (Grundbefindlichkeit) and
Revelatory of God
The reason why Heidegger used the term Befindlichkeit (situatedness)
throughout BT for mood, and not Gefühl (feeling) or Sinn (sense), is because
situatedness denotes our particular way of being „tuned,‟ the stem „find‟
having the same root meaning as the English „find‟, something which helps in
appreciating the idea of how one locates oneself. This point is reinforced
when we remember that the common word for mood in German is
„Stimmung‟, which has the literal meaning tuning and, consequently, relates
the notion of orientation more succinctly than the English variant. The mode
of disclosure which is contained in moods is of capital importance in the
process of ontological and religious elucidation. Above all other moods Angst
discloses Dasein‟s Being, its freedom and possibility, its bound-thrownness as
a „stranger and exile on the earth‟ (Heb. 11.13). Dasein‟s/man‟s Being is
constituted in such a way that fulfillment cannot be found in the merely ontic
dimensions of the world. It is at the ontological level, through mood, that we
recognise our uncanniness (unheimlichkeit), our being not at home (nicht zu
Hause) in-the-world and Heidegger acknowledges that it:
is no accident that the phenomena of anxiety and fear – which are generally
left undistinguished from one another – have come within the orbit of
Christian theology, both ontically and, though within narrow limits,
ontologically. That has happened whenever the anthropological problem of
the being of man in relation to God gained a precedence, and guided the
treatment of phenomena such as faith, sin, love and repentance (Heidegger
1992, 492).
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It is at this point that the explication of the existential analytic in BT
comes closest to a religious interpretation, a step which, if taken, would have
provided a greater degree of clarity on this deeply theological concept. It is
interesting to note that Frederick Copleston suggested Heidegger‟s return to
the pre-Socratic‟s primordial search for the meaning of Being is nothing less
than a return to the quest for God, „his philosophy takes shape as the
historical quest for being, and is seen to be essentially religious‟ (Copleston
1951, 18).
Angst discloses the thrown and ineluctable facticity of our existence, a
hostile and alien sense of deracination, of being uprooted (entwurzelt) and a
prime reason why traditionally existentialism has been considered a
philosophy of nihilism. From a theological perspective, Angst is revelatory of
God, and religious awe, rooted in ontological Angst, was used by Rudolf Otto
as an exemplary illustration of how the numinous was revealed in an affective
state. Heidegger‟s approach to providing a phenomenological description of
Dasein‟s structure is preceded (by ten years) by Otto‟s approach to the study
of The Idea of the Holy, the latter‟s optimistic exploration of the numinous
through an analysis of the emotions/moods of religious experience. Just as
the meaning of Being is inexplicable in terms of everyday experience, so too
is God the element of mysterium in terms of being wholly other. Heidegger
takes as accepted the impenetrability of the primordial mood Angst by ontic
means; for cognition, awareness or knowledge cannot explain, or assume
epistemological priority with respect to the revelations of mood. Moods
disclose Dasein to itself „prior to all cognition and volition, and beyond their
range of disclosure‟ (Heidegger 1992, 175). By stating „beyond their range of
disclosure‟, Heidegger makes clear that the italicised „prior to‟ must be taken
both temporally and logically with respect to the structure of disclosure. Mood
reveals our situation before our understanding formulates an explicit
judgement and also supports the understanding of its judgements. This point
remains one of the most significant contributions of Heidegger‟s philosophy to
the understanding and appreciation of the crucial role of mood analysis in the
constitution and interpretation of human experience.
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It is important at this point to briefly relate what has been said about
Angst to care and its temporal components, each of which will help to reveal
the constancy of the threat created by death in our lives. a) Within the future
dimension of understanding/projection lies the ultimate and most unique
possibility of death, something which heralds the ending of all other
possibilities. Dasein can either choose to accept death and live in recognition
of its end or hide from it by excluding any consideration of it for as long as
possible. b) Death is related to what is already (past), that is, to its facticity
(or what is given). Dasein is, from the moment of life, finite and there is
nothing to be done to escape this permanent factical feature of its condition.
c) Death is ignored by the anonymous „they‟-world in which everyday Dasein
is absorbed. By falling (present) we become distanced from death, illustrated
most simply in the common use of euphemisms such as „he passed on‟, „he
passed away‟ or „he‟s at rest.‟ In this manner Dasein‟s all-pervading
fundamental state, care, underscores death‟s constant threat. What
Heidegger makes explicit in his discussion of death is that Dasein cannot
know its death, yet its way of dealing with death or, in more Heideggerian
terms, the ever-present possibility of the impossibility of Being, can mark it
off as authentic or inauthentic. The authentic mode of being in this regard is
anticipation (vorlaufen, lit. fore-running) which: „reveals to Dasein its lostness
in the they-self [Man-selbst], and brings it face to face with the possibility of
being itself . . . in an impassioned freedom towards death [Freiheit zum
Tode], released from the Illusions of the “they”, and which is factical, certain
of itself, and anxious‟
(Heidegger 1992, 311). Such freedom is Dasein‟s
possibility to die its death, not a death hijacked by the „they‟ but one‟s very
own. There is no template for death; each must decide who one is and what
one wishes to become individually, and to this end to be, to have taken
control of oneself (i.e. to be self-possessed), is to freely choose oneself. In
other words, each quests to reach his or her own potentiality for Being.
In conclusion, as the general assertion of this article is that there exists
an affinity between Heidegger‟s description of inauthenticity and the Christian
notion of humans living without faith, so it is also revealed when it comes to
61
the concept Angst. In a genuine experience of Angst humans are disclosed to
themselves as „being-there‟ (or to-be there), distanced from entities (in
concern) and other Beings (in solicitude) yet opened up (in theological terms)
to their quest for God. In Being and Time, Angst is not fear, for unlike that
emotion Angst has no distinct object within-the-world that is its source. Angst
is not simply a mood aimed out at the world rather it stems from the fact that
„[the] world and Dasein are one . . . Dasein‟s Being-in-the world is . . . both
an absorption in, and a constitution of, the world as such‟ (Kelly 1994, 34). It
stems from Being-in-the-world as it has already been disclosed, „the world as
such is that in the face of which one has Angst‟ (Heidegger 1992, 231). It
discloses human‟s own finite Being as well as the possibility of the ground of
their Being (or God). This possibility is affirmed in Christian faith in God‟s
revelation of himself in religion; and if Angst reveals the ground of Being as
divine, as God the Creator, the separation between Dasein and other entities
disappears. For the worldhood of the world constitutes a plethora of roles,
functions and interactions within which entities may be encountered, and
Dasein is as much a component, is as much a Being-with in-the-world of that
system as Fido the dog or my set of golf clubs.
Dr. Kevin Sludds is an award-winning poet and philosopher; he lectures in
ethics at the Institute of Technology Sligo.
Works Cited
Banville, John. 1992. The Newton Letter. London: Minerva.
Beckett, Samuel. 1976. The Beckett Trilogy. London: Picador.
Copleston, Fredick. 1951. Existentialism and Modern Man. London: Blackfriars.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-world. Boston: MIT Press.
Eichrodt, Walther.1951. Man in the Old Testament, translated by K. and R. Gregor
Smith. London: S.C.M Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. London: Blackwell Press.
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Heidegger, Martin. 1961. An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph
Manheim. New York: Anchor Books.
Heidegger, Martin. 2002. Supplements, translated by John van Buren. New York:
University of New York Press.
Kee, Alistair. 1971. The Way of Transcendence: Christian Faith without Belief in
God. London: Penguin Books.
Kelly, Thomas A. F. 1994. Language and Transcendence: A Study in the Philosophy
or Martin Heidegger and Karl-Otto Apel. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Lauer, Quentin. 1965. Phenomenology: Its Genesis and Prospect. New York: Harper
& Row.
Luther, Martin. 1972. Luther’s Work. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House.
Macquarrie, John. 1955. An Existentialist Theology. London: SCM Press.
Macquarrie, John. 1968. Martin Heidegger. London: Lutterworth Press.
Otto, Rudolf. 1936. The Idea of the Holy, translated by John W. Harvey Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sludds, Kevin. 2009. Emotions: Their Cognitive Base and Ontological Importance.
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1
Abbreviated to BT hereafter.
„Being‟ will be capitalised throughout as a translation of das Sein something which distinguishes it
from „being‟ with a lower case „b‟ which is a translation of the term das Seiende.
3
The biblical phrase “the world”, [is] intended in the pejorative sense of being “that which is opposed
to God”‟ (Alistair Kee, The Way of Transcendence, London: Penguin, 1971, xxviii).
4
The German word Entschlossenheit comes from entscliessen which originally meant „to open, unlock,
to unclose‟ and so, resoluteness has the double meaning of disclosure (erschliessen) and „to reach a
decision‟ (sich entschliessen), to „unlock one‟s mind‟, so to speak. This play on prefixes, which is
typical in BT, allows Heidegger to construct the following, “Resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] is a
distinctive mode of Dasein‟s disclosedness [Erschlossenheit]” (ibid. 343).
5
For a more in-depth examination of the role of mood in Heidegger‟s ontology see my Emotions –
Their Cognitive Base and Ontological Importance, 2009, Oxford: Peter Lang.
2
63
6
Heidegger‟s discomfort at being labelled an „existentialist‟ undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that
his concerns were as exalted as the theologians and mystics he admired. In his later career he would
come closer to them by designating his work not as active and investigative philosophy but as passive
and meditative thinking. Such an approach was summed up in Discourse on Thinking (1966) by the
word „releasement,‟ a term that has a long history in Christian spirituality.
7
„But where shall wisdom be found?/And where is the place of understanding?/Mortals do not know
the way to it,/and it is not found in the land of the living‟ (Job.28:12-13).
8
Literature is replete with examples of this type of insight; here are two brief ones: „It‟s like when he
was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that
this – these trees, this pavement – was life, the real and only thing‟ (Updike, 1996, 57). „I can‟t express
the odd aching pleasure of that moment. I knew, of course, that those hidden lives wouldn‟t be much
different from my own. But that was the point. It wasn‟t the exotic I was after, but the ordinary, that
strangest and most elusive of enigmas‟ (Banville, 1982, 11).
9
„Then God said “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” . . . [He] created man in his own
image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them‟ (Gen. 1.26).
10
In Heideggerian language this is the ontological possibilities of authenticity or inauthenticity.
11
I will leave the word Angst un-translated in an effort to emphasise the move away from the cognitive
notion of objectless fear, which is, itself, often considered a synonym for the English word „anxiety‟,
the common translation of Angst.