Abstract

I examine the charge that Heidegger's account of authenticity in Being and Time is morally nihilistic. I present three plausible interpretations of authentic existence, and claim that only the third is able to defend Heidegger's project against the charge of moral nihilism. ;On the existentialist reading, the authentic individual is free to "create his own values" independent of the impersonal expectations of public opinion and even moral principle. This image of what it means to be self-responsible raises the specter of "subjectivism": that nothing is impermissible except for what the individual decides to define as such. ;On the historicist interpretation, authenticity does not involve the individual creating values ex nihilo, for it requires the creative appropriation of one's "tradition": where "tradition" means the historically rooted, communal constraints that inevitably condition one's possibilities. This provokes worries about "relativism": for if one's choice of self is governed by the authority of tradition, then there seems to be no standpoint from which one can criticise the prejudices of one's group. Nothing precludes one's authentically making commitments that are hostile to the most basic interests of some members of one's own community or of violating the dignity of outsiders. ;On the cosmopolitan interpretation, authentic self-responsibility implies neither "subjectivism" nor "relativism," for it makes possible "authentic being-with-others": an orientation in which one feels an obligation to respect the dignity of other persons and compassion for the suffering of others. I admit that the "cosmopolitan" reading requires that Heidegger's inadequate treatment of being-with-others be developed and that moral conscience be given a more prominent role in the structure of human existence than Heidegger accords to it. My favored interpretation of authenticity, then, demands that certain underplayed strains in Being and Time be accented and turned against the more dominant voices of the text