Wittengenstein had good things to say about Heidegger, by the way, specifically the notion of Angst. I think that and his positive attitudes toward religion and mysticism helped alienate him from the Vienna Circle.
In Heidegger specifically, authenticity (Erschlossenheit, which does not translate literally as "authenticity") is a technical term refering to when the perceived available life-possibilities coincide with the real available life-possibilities. This is why it is connected to truth, and to death and finitude, and to being-one's-self.
Why should I have to use a word in conformity with the tyranny of ordinary praxis? There is no English or German word conveying the meaning "when the perceived available possibilities coincide with the real available possibilities." Unless I want to write the whole thing out every time, isn't a term a good idea? And which ordinary praxis anyway? The word "energy" as used by the layman does not mean the same thing as the word "energy" as used by a physicist in the course of an experiment. If one never stepped outside ordinary practice, there would be no novelty.
Aristotle is like this too, you know. In fact I think that's where Heidegger gets a lot of his neologizing and teasing out meanings from word-roots and so forth -- following his intellectual model. Aristotle does exactly the same thing. He's got like 2 or 3 neologisms a page. You don't see this in English translations, because the words used to translate the neologisms are Anglicizations of the Latin neologisms that were first used by the Romans for the staggeringly difficult task of translating Aristotle into classical Latin -- "energy," "essence," actuality," and so forth -- and are now standard English words.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
> I can't resist interjecting a comment here: ravi,
> this use of the term
> "authenticity" has nothing to do with the meaning of
> the term in the
> kind of useful, everyday life contexts that C.
> refers to. To use
> Wittgenstein's terms (and I'd nominate him for most
> important 20th
> century philosopher if he was not so contemptuous of
> the vast majority
> of philosophy), the everyday language game we play
> with the term
> "authenticity" refers to comparing some object to
> the real thing.
> --Viz, following Carrol, "That is an authentic coin
> from 5 B.C."
> Granted, sometimes terms can be applied formally in
> ways that differ
> from everyday language games, but I'll reiterate
> Carrol's question: what
> is the point of using the term "authenticity" in the
> strange way that H.
> does? To be a little frivolous, why should we play
> the Humpty-Dumpty
> game of letting him define a word however he sees
> fit, without relating
> it to the actual praxis of language use?
>
> Miles
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