Toward Greater Authenticity: From Shame to Existential Guilt, Anxiety, and Grief

The German word that translators of Heidegger's (1927) Being and Time typically translate as “authenticity” is Eigentlichkeit, which literally means “ownedness” or “mineness.” Our existence may be authentic—non-evasively owned—or inauthentic—unowned or disowned. In inauthentic existing, we understand ourselves according to the conventional interpretedness of the “they” (das Man)—the impersonal normative system that governs what “one” understands and what “one” does in one's everyday activity as a member of society and occupant of social roles. One exists as a “they-self” (p. 167), rather than as a differentiated, self-responsible individual.

For Heidegger (1927), authentic existing is coextensive with existential guilt, which is the condition for the possibility of ordinary moral guilt. Existential guilt is a being answerable or accountable to oneself for oneself. “The call of conscience” (p. 314) individualizes us by summoning us from

our lostness in the publicness of the “they” to a taking ownership of, and responsibility for, one's existing as an individual.

Authentic existing, claimed Heidegger (1927), is disclosed in the mood (Stimmung) of anxiety. This is because in taking ownership of our existence, we must also own what our lostness in the “they” has been evading—our “being-toward-death” (p. 277). In authentic existing, we own up to death as our “uttermost” and “ownmost” possibility—“No one can take the Other's dying away from him” (p. 284)—a possibility that is constitutive of our intelligibility to ourselves in our futurity and finitude, and that always impends as a constant threat. In the anxiety that discloses authentic existing, our absorption in the everyday world, which has been shielding us from our finitude, loses its significance, and we feel “uncanny” (unheimlich)—no longer safely at home.1

Just as existential anxiety is disclosive of authentic existing, it is shame, i