Is There a Grammar of Authenticity?

Abstract

One must be taught to write writes. The formality of this phrasing justifies Martin Heidegger's English translators, who translate Das Man not with the formal one, but with the colloquial they.1 This choice lends itself particularly well to the analysis of idle talk, since say prefaces much of the hearsay by which describe our world to another. If the peculiar expressions Das Man and say signal especially strongly that men and women live anonymously [uneigentlich],2 live lives entangled in the myriad concerns of the world, they clearly do not exhaust the structures by which language lures us into a generalized, diffuse existence. As shall see, a pervasive imprecision infuses almost all grammar and syntax with anonymity, rendering categorically authentic language and speech impossible. Tropes such as say or das Man are not scoundrels smuggling anonymity into a language otherwise pure and authentic, but betray a general evasiveness belonging to language itself. However-and this is Heidegger's insistent teaching-where danger prevails, there grows the saving power. It is another dimension of language-the vocative force all language bears -that engenders the possibility of authenticity, that makes it possible for the self to seek an authentic relation to the disclosure of being. And this vocative force bespeaks an authentic relation to others as well, an authentic being-with that does not efface the self, but precisely individuates it. We voice our anonymity variously. We voice it with this very who are never me but a generalized I, an inflated until it looms as we. Mark Twain said that the editorial is only legitimate for editors and people with tapeworms. But use the generalized often in formal discourse, such as academic prose, because, while not exactly objective, it at least appears to escape the radical subjectivity of the merely We know that when speak as we, have made our thought vulnerable to an attack that speaking simply as protects itself against. The replaces the subjective not with the neutral, objective third person one or they, but with a neutral and generalized subjectivity. Can a generalized subjectivity live authentically? Is not its very generalization a resignation to falling? Heidegger himself is fond of speaking with the authority of this generalized subjectivity, for it is the accepted idiom we scholars speak and write. The answer to the problem of generalized subjectivity might seem to be particular subjectivity, the Of course, the appeal to a foundational that would underlie all experience, whether it be Descartes' cogito or Kant's transcendental unity of the I think, undermines Heidegger's project at its core, as he and numerous readers remind us.' But let us try to see this phenomenally, and not merely strategically, as part of a polemic against subjectivity. Modern philosophy taught that all experience and all thought is the thought and experience of the I; the says only itself, thinks only itself. As such, the autonomous would seem better equipped than other modes of speech to resist the peer pressure of public speech. But, proximally and for the most part, does the speak authentically when it says I? Does it do so in our experience? If it does, why are beginning writers taught to remove the I tag from their assertions, told that their statements are stronger without it? Clearly, is immoral speaks more strongly than I think war is immoral. The I often manifests itself as a defense against accountability, an evasion of having to take a stand in the world, a retreat from being-in-the-world to the haven of the unworlded cogito where every proposition is true, at least insofar as I it. The I appears as an apology and an evasion, not the accomplishment of authenticity. It is this weak and puny that makes up the everyday self of Dasein. …