My favorite class I am taking this semester is 20th Century Philosophy. I would like to share something I believe to be amazingly profound, raw, true, and something that is currently hitting very close to home. It's one of Heidegger's many theories.
First I will present the facts. According to Heidegger not only is man "thrown into the world" without asking to be there, but he must constantly become his true self by making appropriate decisions. Along the way, man experiences a "falleness," a loss of his "authentic" character.
Falleness points to the universal tendency of man to lose himself in his present preoccupations and concerns, alienating himself from his unique and personal future possibilities. He thus becomes a reduced self.
The falleness of human being receives its most obvious expression in the activities of gossip, mere curiosity and ambiguity. Gossip, for example, is an authentic modification of speech which simply repeats the accepted, everyday, conventional, and shallow interpretations of the public.
His authentic existence requires that he recognize and affirm his own unique self with his responsibility for his every action.
A person's drift into inauthentic existence is subtle but in every case it involves a tendency to escape from one's self by finding refuge in a public self, in an impersonal identity, the impersonal "one" in contrast to the concrete "I." The inauthentic person behaves as "one" is expected to instead of as "I" ought to. He reads and judges music, art, and literature as "one" is expected to; in public he suppresses any urge to be unique, to excel.
The inauthentic man levels himself downward toward an averageness and behaves like the average "everyman." But a person cannot, according to Heidegger, indefinitely avoid confronting his true self. (Then there's some stuff about anxiety then being what comes next in a "falleness" and how it is not a psychological state but rather a mode of being. Anxiety is not fear for fear is attatched to an object such as a snake or an enemy where as Anxiety reveals the presence of "nothingness" in our being. This could be a whole other blog in itself, and it might be, so I'll continue with the "falleness."
When a person affirms his authentic self, when he sees transparently what and who he is, he discovers that in his inauthentic existence he has been trying to do the impossible, namely, to hid the fact of his limitations and his essential temporality(like temporality on earth, we know we will not live forever).
How this old white man, this philosopher, this scholar knows so much about the petty shallow life we, or at least I, try to combat everyday baffles me. But all that aside, it's very true. I have always felt a need a want a desire to live for more than just myself, but for the past year haven't been. I have been living in a "falleness." Now I can see what I saw before my falleness, and that is others living in their falleness. It is so apparent and scary because I think some people don't escape their falleness their entire high school or college career. I think it's possible others never escape and find their authentic self. But in a society like ours, it's difficult and almost impossible to live for something more. I am racking my brain for examples, if you have any please share. But this world, our society definitely incourages an inauthentic self and a group mentality. They encourage us to all behave as "one" because that is not threatening, or scary. Please help us, help me, help each other not to be tempted to live as or be limited by the collective and average "everyman." Find your truth, find your authentic character as I search desperately for mine as well.