[lbo-talk] "The Authentic"? was ....Grappling....

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Thu May 18 08:25:37 PDT 2006


No. In the world of the tribesman, predicting the future based on entrails is experienced as having a truth value and therefore is not inauthentic. The spouse in denial over the faithless husband/wife and the soldier who just "knows" he ain't gonna die are actually fully aware of the real state of affairs, and are choosing not to acknowledge it. That is why they are inauthentic. For that matter, I engage in constant self-deceptions on the matter of my nicotine intake that I know full well are utter bullshit but do anyway -- I've been "going to quit tomorrow" for about 5 years now. That is inauthentic behavior.

This has nothing to do with ethics, by the way. It is descriptive and value-free.

It's a little weird to hear Heidegger attacked in this way, since he is usually attacked as a cultural and epistemological relativist who thinks Aristotelian physics and modern physics have equal truth values, talks about the gods a lot, and thinks pre-Socratic philosophy was the profoundest thinking in history.

--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
> So lack of Erschlossenheit is--practically
> speaking--a term of
> opprobrium for people who interpret their life
> situation in ways that
> seem implausible and/or inappropriate to you? The
> ethnocentrism and
> presentism of this is just breathtaking to me:
> should we define an
> Azande tribesman as "inauthentic" because he makes
> confident predictions
> about the future based on chicken entrails? The
> assumption that we can
> nonproblematically and categorically determine
> "actual" life
> possibilities so that we can identify how people
> just don't match up to
> our privileged insight into how they should act is a
> wonderful example
> of philosophical hubris.
>
> Miles
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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