Heidegger and authenticity

pp. 123-142

in: Peter Lucas, Ethics and self-knowledge, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

The Hegelian concept of recognition ties the ethics of self-interpretation to an ethic of self-realisation. However, it rests on essentialist claims about the nature and possibility of self-knowledge that are unlikely to be sympathetically viewed in the generally liberal and anti-essentialist atmosphere of contemporary applied and professional ethics. This chapter aims to show how a non-essentialistic alternative might be developed, which preserves some key features of Hegel's model, on the basis of Heidegger's account of authenticity. Heidegger can be said to take a sceptical essentialist view of human nature. Just as knowledge remains an issue for the epistemological sceptic, even while he rejects it, so Heidegger's approach to the question of what it is to be human acknowledges that our own being never ceases to be an issue for us, while recognising that to embrace any of the (ultimately instrumentally derived) self-conceptions that are available to us would be inauthentic.