ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the notion of the owning of norms is important in understanding Martin Heidegger's authenticity, that is a simplification. It addresses the threat that the need for an openness—a seeing—of some such form might seem to pose to the idea that it is also a seeing-as. One of the key ideas that Iris Murdoch helped put—or rather put back—on the Anglophone philosophical map is—as Justin Broackes articulates it—'a resistance to the idea that the content of morality must be statable in the form of universal principles'. McDowell sees in Aristotle too the same recognition of uncodifiability—of 'untapability'—though stripped of the 'vividly realized pictorial presentation' his master Plato's Forms gave it. One's normative engagement with the world thereby has a certain distinctive immediacy—and represents a seeing-as—by virtue of one's owning norms, one's internalizing, one might say, some particular 'as'.
