Inauthentic Understanding
It wasn’t enough for me to read Being and Time, the primary Heidegger source, and be totally stupefied. I am now reading the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger and am only just lost, not stupefied. But I did appreciate the following from Harrison Hall’s essay: Intentionality and World: Division I of Being and Time:Anxiety for human beings is analogous to breaking down for pieces of equipment. Just as the breaking down of equipment can show its worldly character by revealing its place in a network of relations in which it has become dysfunctional, so anxiety can show the groundless character of human being by revealing the contingency of the network of purposes and projects and their background of intelligibility in which we are no longer involved by virtue of our having become “dysfunctional.”
[…]
The inauthentic form of understanding is (idle) “curiosity.” In order to avoid coming to grips with the unsettling deep truths about our being and world, we occupy ourselves with the kind of questioning of our being and world that can be satisfied by the superficial sense of things that (every) one has and by the kinds of irrelevant information that is the stuff of superficial conversation and gossip. And it is just such superficial conversation and gossip, “idle talk” for Heidegger, that makes up the inauthentic version of discourse. Having no deep understanding of things to communicate to others, and afraid of being silent for fear of “hearing” the deeper truth about our being (the “call of conscience”), we engage in the kind of noisy chatter that never questions or gets below the anonymous public understanding of things and, hence, never really says anything.
Feel free to discuss.
posted by Mike @ 4:19 PM
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