ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger is the epitome of a profound and committed thinker. Heidegger’s depiction of human agency and authenticity is neither naive nor unsophisticated. He does not espouse a facile Rousseau-inspired model of individualism. His model of authenticity, or Eigentlichkeit, purports to be embedded in the world, including the social world, with its limits and traditions as well as its creativity and freedom. Heidegger, moreover, emphasizes that Dasein is not a fixed thing – as an entity it is temporal and inherently related to our inalienable capacity for choice and becoming. Ascribing authenticity or fallenness involves, at its core, just such a parochial value judgement. Grounding authenticity in terms of ontology and death is to give it no ground at all, unless one is willing to reify the meaning of death and to assume that one’s contingent notions of death indicate a transcendent ontological truth.
