ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the theme of distance or separation and its eventual overcoming, as it emerges in some aspects of Husserl and Heidegger. It considers the question of the relation between the achievement of the ideal way of life envisioned by phenomenology and the very practice of phenomenology itself: phenomenology both contains an imperative for a more authentic mode of existence. The chapter briefly sketches out the relation in Husserl between the practice of phenomenology and the achievement of its accompanying ideal of self-responsibility. Doing so yields a model against which to measure Heidegger and thereby track the fate of these ideas and their possible interrelations when Husserl’s ideal of autonomy becomes Heidegger’s ideal of authenticity, and when transcendental phenomenology is transformed into an inquiry into the meaning of being. At the junctures of Being and Time, Heidegger offers a brief but intriguing characterization of the way in which authenticity transforms one’s relations to others.
