Authenticity and Heidegger's Search for Solid Ground

A discourse of melancholy also figures into the way Heidegger describes his central notions of authenticity and inauthenticity. Heidegger believes that we exist fundamentally with others and therefore that the consciousness of the other is part and parcel of my own being and consciousness. We are born into a complicated previously existing social nexus with its own rules, assumptions and conceptual framework. Thus, as a necessary and fundamental structure of the human condition, being with others is neither good nor bad. Of course, positive relations such as love and friendship can only arise out of social being. But Heidegger also speaks disapprovingly of an anonymous "they" consisting of "everyone and no-one":

"This being with one another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into the kind of being of "the Others", in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of "the they" is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see and judge about literature and art as they see and judge… we find "shocking" what they find shocking. The "they", which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness…"

We all at times somehow lose ourselves in the "public" mentality (fads, gossip, "idle- talk"). By participating in this process, we are to neutralize or cover over the anxiety naturally arising out of our consciousness of other deeper, more disturbing structures of the human condition, most specifically the radical finitude of each of our own lives. Being lost in the banal attitudes of the public "they" allows us to flee from what is (and what must essentially be) the solitary nature of our confrontation with our own mortality.

Consider the forms of inauthenticity discussed by Heidegger;he first discusses "idle-talk" – the preoccupation with gossip and superficialities which functions to divert our attention. It is also worth noting that his characterization of "idle-talk", a means by which the "they-self" operates in its fleeing from authentic understanding, is described specifically in terms of the phenomenon of "groundlessness":

What is said in the talk as such, spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character… Idle talk is constituted by… gossiping and passing the word along – a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness…

Why is it important to understand that Heidegger was preoccupied with providing an analysis of the human condition which is "rooted" and "grounded"? And why was he so often extolling the virtues of the agrarian lifestyle? Because, as Rudiger Safranski writes: "the collapse of yesterday's world in a world war … persuaded Heidegger that the ground was shaking and that new beginning had to be made."

Echoing Yeats' depiction above of how "things fall apart", the sense of dislocation and unsettledness is also evident in many cultural products of Germany's interwar years. Hence Brecht's Man Equals Man:

    Hopes you'll feel the ground on which you stand
    Slither between your toes like shifting sand
    So that (the story) makes you aware
    Life on this Earth is a hazardous affair.

The artist Georg Grosz also notes, "I felt the ground shaking beneath my feet, and the shaking was visible in my work." (see Willett 9). Consider also the following interpretation of Ernst Bloch's 1932 essay "Berlin, as Viewed from the Landscape", by David Durst:

Similar to the uprooted and mobile modern individual, Berlin is a city rising up out of an empty space, without apparent historical origins or firm foundation: sitting "upon ground that is still undeveloped, unstable and perpetually in need of improvement", it is literally a city built on sand where the dust never settles. Like its restless dwellers, Berlin "always becomes and never is", it is a city of unrest and perpetual becoming with all its resident themes of instability and unmet potential.

This perceived backdrop of a shifting, unstable, and restless world provides the context which now renders Heidegger's entire philosophical project more intelligible – insofar as it involves an analysis of the human condition as essentially grounded and bound to the earth. Modernist artists like Brecht and Grosz may have been willing to embrace and/or artistically depict Europe's spiritual dislocation, but Heidegger's anti-modernism sought a return to a more solid, grounded reality. This is why his analysis can be considered on some level as a discourse of melancholy. In fact, Heidegger also wrote a number of pieces ("On the Essence of Ground" and others) explicitly addressing the meaning of "ground." In these works, the German term "grund" has often been translated as "reason", but perhaps this issue is also implicitly and more fundamentally about the search for "grounding" in a more existential sense. Certainly, as a society begins to lose its grounding, it requires a new set of values or guiding conceptual frameworks. But what happens when these are not forthcoming in an immediate or obvious sense? This cultural crisis formed the backdrop for Heidegger's entire philosophical career and it is evident even in the "objective" categories of his earliest and most important work Being andTime.

In Being and Time, Heidegger also discusses "curiosity" – the continuous search for the new and novel as a distractive technique. In Heidegger's words, "When curiosity has become free, however, it concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen, but just in order to see it. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. In this kind of seeing… lies… in the possibilities of abandoning itself to the world."  David Durst discusses precisely this formof "distraction" through an analysis of Siegfried Kracauer's writings on Weimar cinema. Kracauer explained the fascination with the glamour and lights of the picture palaces where "distraction is raised to the level of culture."

Phenomenologically, distracted curiosity is drawn by the rapid fire pace of consecutive images, a "fragmented sequence of sense impressions," in which: "the stimulations of the senses succeed one another with such rapidity that there is no room left between them for even the slightest contemplation… The penchant for distraction demands and finds an answer in the display of pure externality… " Heidegger would use the term "groundlessness" to capture a similarexperience: "This movement of Dasein… we call its "downward plunge." Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic existence." In place of this restless search for diversion, Heidegger prescribes instead only the difficult process of consciously confronting and accepting our own finitude. "Authenticity" thus involves another, slightly different melancholy than the mourning of lost innocence. This latter sense involves the acceptance of one's own mortality, and the contingency of all life. But confronting this condition makes us uncomfortable. Heidegger acknowledges that the superficial gossip of the "they" steadfastly refuses to allow each of us as individuals a silent space in which to reflect. It refuses to allow us the "courage for anxiety" in the face of death. This different melancholy is thus a threat to the "they", and when it asserts itself, inauthentic forms of public discourse make sure to "change the subject" and suppress it as quickly as possible.