One only has to add that there is no way to refute or test Heidegger's notions about existence in the empirical world and he would be getting at some more of my objections.
Further, when going through Heidegger's statements on authenticity or death one will have to add that Heideggerians will not be pinned down to a literal interpretation of what Heidegger says. Thus the ground keeps shifting to analogy or metaphor and back to literal interpretation. Sometimes Heidegger makes a literal statement that is possible to take literally such as "all men die alone" and then it turns out that he doesn't exactly mean "all men die alone." There are similar problems with authenticity but I have already expressed my views on these topics.
But I think that Miles's questions and Chris's answers create a chasm of interpretation that Chris is not confronting directly.
There is a "ground" to Heidegger's notion of authenticity and that ground is not precisely "local conditions" but rather what he means by local conditions which is his conception of "the people". This more specifically comes out to be a romantic nationalist belief in the "Volk". The strength of work of art, the "essence of language," and the stage of "authenticity" all are grounded on the idea of these "local conditions," but more specifically "eines geschichtlichen Volks," a specific historical people.
I would like to make a distinction between "social authenticity" and "existential authenticity."
Going back to my initial comment on "Authenticity" and Heidegger I related the anxiety over sincerity/authenticity from the late 16th century through to the 19th century. Other characters in Fielding's "Vanity Fair" could ask of Becky Sharp if she is an "authentic Countess" and if she is sincere. The answer would be no in both cases. Her lack of authenticity and her insincerity are both socially important features in the society that Fielding describes. In this case I am referring to Becky's social authenticity. She pretends to be a countess but she is not, earlier in the novel she pretends to be a descended of an exiled French noble woman but she is not. The anxiety over social authenticity led to a concern over sincerity and Becky unfortunately fails the test on both counts.
It is obvious that Heidegger is concerned with existential authenticity and not social authenticity. But I would argue that the instability of Heidegger's concept of existential authenticity leads him through the backdoor to a concept of social authenticity. I earlier stated: "In Wordsworth's terms, authenticity was a relation of an artist to himself, the integrity of his art, and the strength to create himself as a kind of work of art, through his art." Wordsworth's authenticity is grounded in his notion of the artist and his art. This kind of Romantic authenticity is "for" something -- in other words it is not merely a descriptive term but also has normative implications for the strength of the artist and his art.
The question of the "ground" of authenticity is not as direct for Heidegger because there are multiple ways for Heidegger to get to the same place. The site of the work of art is always a specific "cultural" and language context. The place of language is always the historical specialness of the people. The place of Authenticity is in the context of how Heidegger sees language and art. But in all cases these "local conditions" are some historical essence of the national Volk. This is how "existential authenticity" weaves back to "social authenticity" like a Mobius strip of intellectual history. And it is for much the same reason that problems of authenticity/sincerity troubled writers in the first place; the anxiety of loss of place. In Heidegger's case it was an anxiety of loss of national the national volk to the forces of modernism, industrialism, and technology.
Let me suggest that "authenticity" in Heidegger's Romantic-nationalist sense is a lot less acceptable than "authenticity" in the Romantic-artistic sense.
On 5/19/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
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