Authenticity

Virtue needs authenticity, and society, which forces us into pretending we are someone else, rules authenticity out. Being virtuous therefore means withdrawing from society.

Put simply Rousseau: you cannot be good without being true to yourself. Society makes us pretend to be someone else, so it makes that impossible. To be virtuous, you have to withdraw from society.

Inauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one.

Put simply Heidegger: living inauthentically means conforming, letting convention make your decisions and doing "what one does". The one in charge is "das Man", the faceless "they" that is everyone and no one.

Other readings Hubert Dreyfus (Being-in-the-World, 1991) reads das Man as the shared background of norms and practices that makes things intelligible at all, a positive structure of Dasein that also pulls toward conformity.

Where to read it Heidegger, Being and Time §27 (H. 126–130).

Heidegger insists Being and Time passes no moral judgment; Shore thinks that disavowal disingenuous, since any reader can see he finds living authentically far more impressive than living inauthentically.

Surrendering to the they estranges Dasein from its authentic self, yet Heidegger argues the estrangement is comforting: going along with the crowd is easier than being oneself.

Put simply Heidegger: giving in to the crowd cuts us off from our real selves. But that loss is comforting, because going along with everyone is easier than being yourself.

Authenticity means facing, eyes open, that one is finite and always moving toward one's own death (Sein-zum-Tode). Inauthenticity is at bottom a way of fleeing that awareness.

Put simply Heidegger: living authentically means facing, eyes open, that you are finite and always moving toward your own death, his "being-toward-death". Living inauthentically is at bottom a way of running from that knowledge.

Heidegger, Shore observes, offers readers little incentive to choose authenticity: the clarity it brings is plainly miserable, close to unbearable.

Confronting one's own death alone, shaken by Angst, can produce resoluteness: taking hold of oneself and owning one's choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, which Heidegger wants felt.

Put simply Heidegger: facing your own death alone, shaken by dread, can make you "resolute": you take hold of your life and own your choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, and he wants readers to feel it.

Gombrowicz presses the point: on Sartre's terms, someone who chooses frivolity over authenticity or falsehood over truth faces no hell and no penalty, except lacking a true existence.

Shore thinks people reasonably ask whether Heidegger leaves room for authentic life among others: his authenticity demands the profound loneliness of facing one's own death.

Living in truth carries a strong Heideggerian motif: Havel takes over the authentic/inauthentic distinction but turns it into an explicitly moral one.

Put simply Shore hears Heidegger in Havel's "living in truth," refusing the regime's pretenses. Havel takes Heidegger's contrast between living authentically and inauthentically and makes it openly moral.

In Shore's telling the course moves from epistemology (truth as mind matching object), via ontology, to ethics (truth against lies, authenticity against inauthenticity); history occupies the middle.

Put simply Shore's map of the course: from truth as the mind matching the world, through questions of what it means to exist, to truth as the opposite of lies and of living falsely. History sits in the middle.