I would say that the Nazi who genuinely believes Jews are Untermenschen and a threat to the race and thereby goes about slaughtering them is being totally authentic. As I said, it is a descriptive, not normative, term. It is perfectly possible to be authentic and be a mass murderer at the same time. It has nothing to do with ethics.
Heidegger would definitely say that authenticity is determined by local ideas or as he would put it local "understandings of the world."
Heidegger is doing phenomenology, i.e., analysis of consciousness (in Husserl's view) or experience of being (in Heidegger's view). There is no way one will derive a common ethics by examining the consciousness/experience (that is, the world as experienced by them) of the empirically existing human beings Hitler, Stalin, and Ghandi.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
> I want to thank Chris for correcting my
> misconceptions about H's use of
> the term "authenticity" (obviously I'm no Heidegger
> scholar). This idea
> of "actual life possibilities" kept nagging at me,
> though, and I
> realized walking between classes yesterday why this
> concept is
> problematic. A simple example should make this
> clear:
>
> A German in 1940 who denies that he is a member of
> the master race and
> Jews are inferior.
>
> Is this an example of inauthenticity? Horns of the
> dilemma: if "actual
> life possibilities" are determined by local cultural
> traditions and
> customs, as Chris noted in response to my Azande
> witch doctor example,
> then this is a clear example of inauthenticity. If
> "actual life
> possibilities" are determined by some general
> standards that are not
> tied to local traditions (say, the principle that
> people of all races
> deserve respect and equal rights under the law),
> then this is an example
> of authenticity.
>
> This leads us to what I consider far more important
> and interesting
> questions: how do social and political relations
> produce and sustain
> certain perspectives about "actual life
> possibilities"? How do those
> culturally disseminated perspectives about "the way
> things are" in turn
> reinforce social inequalities? How can we
> practically change people's
> perceptions of "the way things are" to challenge the
> status quo? What
> disappoints me is that the type of philosophical
> analysis presented by
> the Heidegger fans onlist obscures these important
> questions rather than
> bringing them to the forefront.
>
> Miles
>
>
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