Sobre la autenticidad de Heidegger. Perplejidad de la orientación ontológica

Abstract

The question of being and the concept of authenticity share a reputation as the most discredited presuppositions of Heidegger’s thought. The article seeks to explain both issues outside this reputation and outside the usual frame of existential analytic discourse. It examines the correlation Heidegger establishes between an ontology of authenticity and the development of authentic ontology. The issue of authenticity is crucial for understanding Heidegger’s idea of explanatory philosophical practice, rather than representing his idea of the human being or an anthropological detour toward the question of being. To avoid failures in addressing Heidegger’s account of authenticity and the question of being, the article follows one of his minor “ontic” remarks about authentic Dasein and the expectation of a noticeable change in its relation to the world, summarized in the phrase “as if nothing has happened.” We propose reading authenticity from its positive obverse, “as if something has happened,” indicating a shift from expected enactment of change to the change that emerges when we radicalize the suspicion that nothing has occurred. This phrase becomes exemplary for understanding decision as a paradoxical revelation of what is decided. Ontology reveals the enacted, unreflected transformation, the transformation as the “ownmost” mode of explication. Explication becomes questionable when it derives meaning from its own mere existence. Authenticity is an agency generated by the ontology that describes the guidance of descriptive agency itself.