Heidegger’s Existentialism: Angst, Authenticity, and Death (oh my!)

Heidegger's Philosophy, Part II

18th-century Memento Mori from a guild in Stary Sącz, Poland

-Read time 10 minutes-

Last essay, I unpacked Heidegger’s obsession with Being and humans being-in-the-world, so that, to understand Being, we cannot simply rationally contemplate existence. (Looking at you, Descartes.) If you haven’t read the last essay, I recommend it. Otherwise, this paper will be needlessly confusing, instead of merely needfully confusing. 

Caution: This essay includes increasingly personal interpretations of some cryptic Heideggerian concepts; I’m a reader of Heidegger, not an expert.

Now, onward to consider death, Angst, and more hyphenated words. 

Being with others

Beings stand out in different ways, as, for example, present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. The coffee mug reveals itself as a part of my thirstiness and caffeine addiction, the keyboard as part of my blogging activities; they are ready-to-hand. Crucially, my evaluation of these things aren’t disinterested calculations made on my part. I care about my coffee and the quality of my essays (or lack thereof).

“Care” is an essential term for Heidegger. We are not disinterested observers. Care runs through and through Dasein. Care reveals itself in different ways. We fundamentally exist with other people, for example. We cannot even think of ourselves as an isolated unit. “Being-with” is Heidegger’s hyphenated phrase to capture our fundamentally social nature. 

More than that, we are “being-for” others; as parents, we take care of our children. We care for our friends by going rock climbing with them. In short, care uncovers itself as a basic way of being in the world.

Even when I blog “by myself,” if I really pay attention, it’s not just me, the coffee mug, the computer, and my cares. In a sense, the engineer who made the computer, the factory worker who mass-produced the mug, the CEO of that company, the coffee pickers, and more, all exist in the background.

This reveals another key propensity of Dasein.

“Falling” into “they”

My blogging and coffee activities aren’t entirely isolated, as though I drink coffee alone; social being is built into everyday ready-to-hand interactions. Heidegger calls the others in the background of all my activities “they-selves.” One of the reasons I drink coffee is because it’s a part of my culture; it’s expected of me. As such, Heidegger thinks we easily find ourselves “falling” into routine activities. Another example is “idle talk,” empty conversation that obscures what it means to live and be. The prototypical idle talk is discussing the weather: “How about this nice weather, we’re having?” Or, if you live in the UK, “God, rubbish weather, innit?”

In short, most of us move about from expected activity to expected activity. We wake up at 7:00am, take a shower, brush our teeth, dress according to accepted styles, go to work, come home, watch Netflix, and start the whole thing over. (Or, if you’re a philosopher, wake up at 12pm, smoke and cigarette, skip the shower, etc.) 

Unreflectively, or, better, unengagedly, going about from socially expected task to task constitutes inauthenticity. When our individual Dasein becomes less our own, and more divided up among others, we lose our individual grasp of Dasein, and fall into inauthenticity. We get caught up in the they-selves.

Recall that Dasein (German for “being-there” or “there-being”) is not synonymous with a human or even an individual. Dasein is the “being for which its being is in question.” If we phenomenologically examine the characteristics of Dasein, we find Dasein is often “spread out” among others. In other words, Dasein is not a unitary “thing” in one singular body, but fragmented and dispersed among other beings when in the mode of inauthenticity. 

We are fundamentally social beings, with inherited culture, expectations, and values. So, as sociality is at the bottom of what it means to be Dasein. While we can’t escape our social nature, we can change how we relate to this fact.

In sum, Dasein are fundamentally social beings that care about our lives and other beings—we can get “lost in the sauce” of day-to-day activities where we live inauthentically for the “they-selves.” This all seems plausible and intuitive. 

So what?

Zombies.

If we approach other people as present-at-hand, we get lead astray. We don’t deal with other people as present-at-hand day-to-day. According to Descartes, for example, we’re made up of thinking stuff plus fleshy stuff because what else could consciousness be aside from non-physical “stuff”? This leads to the philosophical “problem” of other minds: How do we know other people aren’t just walking zombies with no thoughts or feelings? These are called philosophical zombies, or, facetiously, “P-zombies.” In other words, Dasein isn’t merely “stuff” of any kind, soul or body.

Heidegger, rightly, I think, takes being-with others as a basic assumption that doesn’t need proving. (It’s a-priori, to get fancy.) The issue of “other minds” only arises when we view humans as present-at-hand. This skepticism of other minds denies how we generally deal with others; we’re not disinterested, free-floating observers. We are “being-with” and “being-for” others; other people are ready-to-hand. 

So, what it authenticity? Well, this gets tricky, and it’s difficult to pin Heidegger down here. Authenticity isn’t merely a rational reflection on one's life. Authenticity means something like taking hold of one’s life; it means leading life in light of…what? Authenticity means leading life in light of nothingness, namely, death.

Buckle up for a hefty dose of existentialism.¹

Death, authenticity, and Guilt(!)

In what follows, I give a speculative interpretation of Heidegger—I’m not claiming this is the only viable way to understand him. 

I take Heidegger to mean authenticity is actively living life in terms of future possibilities, recognizing that one possibility is closed off to us—infinite continuation. Nothingness confronts us in death; for Heidegger, death is not an event in our lives, it’s merely a cessation. This realization gives us back over to caring about life. Heidegger, by the way, is obsessed with time in addition to being (hence his magnum opus, Being and Time). 

In other words, in contemplating death, we find ourselves shocked into recognizing our own way of being—as radically contingent in a world that ends in nothingness. Sound horrible? Actually, it sounds anxiety-inducing. And, indeed, Heidegger seems to think Angst in the face of death and the free-floating nature of reality is what shocks us into authenticity. Our Angst in the face of nothingness brings us around to realize our inauthenticity. 

We must make our being our own. 

It’s not only Angst, but guilt, that forces us to grapple with the disconcerting, existential reality that we must lead our lives, despite being dragged along—despite being thrown into a culture and time in history over which we have little control over. As Sartre famously writes, “We are condemned to be free.” 

Heidegger does not think responsibilities or moral law is at the foundation of this existential disposition—it is rather guilt itself. He characterizes this sense of guilt as an exclamation in the text by writing, “Guilt!” which I find funny for some reason.

However, “Guilt!” is not an ethical concept, it is, rather, a precondition for morality. Without the structure of “Guilt!” in our very nature, we cannot have morality. What that morality is is mostly absent in his work (and he wasn’t exactly the most moral guy, as a literal Nazi. See my last essay.)

Dasein cannot escape “Guilt!” or death, so, according to Heidegger, we must live authentically, we must strive to take hold of Being, to really grab the reins of life. We can’t escape our culture or social nature, but we can, somehow, engage authentically with others. How? 

It’s not clear. 

One way to understand authenticity 

I’m about to make another interpretive leap here, but this reminds me (and probably many others) of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence,” which says we should live according to which we would re-live every experience in our lives; living life as though we would need to live the same life over and over, for eternity. Perhaps, similarly, Heidegger is showing how humans can live in light of the inevitability of death, guilt, and atheism.²  

Heidegger is insightful in many ways here. Humans seem fundamentally guilty, we can notice, and rightly, live life with death in mind (Carpe Diem!); we cannot escape our social nature or cultural influences; we often get stuck in the mundane, and we cannot even contemplate life without other humans. These observations, however, tell us very little about how to live life.

But, really, what is authenticity?  

According to one study, over 80 percent of Gen Z holds authenticity as an “all-important value.” But, for this generation (and Heidegger) what authenticity means or entails is difficult to pin down, precisely because it is ethically contentless. To be fair, Heidegger is studying “Being”, not ethics, but authenticity seems woefully incomplete without something to be authentic about.

Authenticity, rightly, says we cannot just “go with the flow,” but what then? Always swim upstream? Put another way: be authentically, what? You’ve approached the they-selves with a new sense of living for oneself, but how does one live with a grip of your own being? Which possibilities do we choose? Couldn’t I authentically be a mean-spirited person? 

The modern world’s anxiety problem 

The rate of general anxiety is rising in Western societies.³ Could it be, in part, because we have championed individualism and “authenticity” to such a degree that it overwhelms us with infinite possibilities without wisdom? Authenticity and death open us up to the depths of our freedom, without showing us how to be free or even deal with guilt. I don’t want to simplify a clearly multi-faceted issue, as anxiety correlates with social media use, for example. 

However, as Stephen Weller points out (although, I think, overstates) in “Phenomenology is sinful,” phenomenology centers around inwardly analyzing experience, and can thus only get us so far. I think the existentialists, like Heidegger, plumb the depth and breadth of human freedom and experience without coming up with the right ways of living.

So, if I may put it dramatically, phenomenological freedom becomes slavery to nothingness.

Read the anti-Nazi, not the Nazi, for ethics

I accidentally set this essay up perfectly to lead into my paper on Bonhoeffer, even though I published the latter first. So, ideally, you could read Heidegger Part I and Heidegger Part II for an interesting view of humanity and ontology, then read my essay on Bonhoeffer for a constructive ethic. 

This creates a nice full circle, as Heidegger was a Nazi, and Bonhoeffer was executed for resisting the vile ideology. Although he likely read Heidegger, Bonhoeffer saw the personal Christian God as the ultimate being, who generates all beings from his own being.

The Christian God, who Bonhoeffer and I follow, generously grants peace from anxiety, freedom from guilt, and wisdom to all who ask in faith.

Thanks for reading. 

Soli Deo Gloria

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PS: I’m done with Heidegger for a while. I dipped my toe in his philosophy in undergrad, and stepped a little deeper in Grad school, but I’m on the precipice of taking the plunge head-first. 

I think I won’t. 

I’m giving up Being and Time for now (about halfway through) and going back to analytic philosophy for a while. Ideally, I would write at least one more essay on Heidegger to unpack his most important piece of philosophy, which is about how time, Dasein, and Being relate. But, this world is not ideal.

I’m considering writing about the philosophy of mind, G.E.M. Anscombe, or something political next. See you then.

1. Heidegger later disavowed the term “existentialism,” but people call him that anyway.

2. It’s surprisingly difficult to say whether Heidegger was an atheist. He studied theology and was a Catholic in his early life, but eventually left the church. He seemed to come to some vaguely theistic view late in life, but nothing like classical, Christian theism.

3. For Heidegger, Angst means something like the overwhelming feeling of detachment and radical contingency. Angst is not about anything in particular, and thus, it is about Being and care itself. In short, Angst and modern anxiety are related but not the same.