Denis McManus

Heidegger’s discussion of ‘Being-towards-death’ occupies a prominent position in his reflections on authenticity; but it has attracted fierce criticism, and poses profound interpretative challenges. This paper will offer a novel interpretation of that discussion as contributing to the articulation of a not-implausible account of self-knowledge and self-acknowledgement. The term typically translated as ‘authenticity’—‘Eigentlichkeit’—can be translated more literally as ‘ownness’ or ‘ownedness’; and my reading reveals Eigentlichkeit to be the ‘owning’ of one’s own judgment, an ‘owning’ that manifests itself in a distinctive relationship to one’s death. The reading builds on a comparison of Heidegger’s discussion of ‘Being-towards-death’ with his examination in 1920-21 of St Paul’s remarks on the Last Judgment. I propose that Heidegger sees in the latter remarks an understanding of what it is to be willing to stand before God, and that this provides a model for Heidegger of an understanding of what it is to be willing to stand before oneself. The (confused) desire to escape God’s judgment is a desire to avoid what one takes to be the facts about oneself and manifests itself in a distinctive relationship to the Last Judgment; alienation from one’s own judgment is the avoidance of the same facts and can be identified, I argue, with Heideggerian inauthenticity and its distinctive mode of Being-towards-death.