David C. Abergel

In his private notes written in 1936 (now published as GA82), Heidegger enumerates three “fundamental deceptions” at play in Being and Time (1927). The thrust of these deceptions is twofold: that Dasein is something given and that the task of phenomenology is to describe Dasein in its givenness. These are deceptions, Heidegger claims in 1936, because Dasein is not something given, but can only be reached in a leap, and because the task of phenomenology is not to describe Dasein in its givenness, but to bring about Dasein and the “there,” the site of Being’s happening, through a creative leap-in. Scholars might be inclined to read these deceptions as further evidence for the view that Heidegger in the 1930s abandons phenomenology understood as a descriptive enterprise oriented toward givenness. This paper argues, to the contrary, that phenomenology for the young Heidegger was never a descriptive enterprise oriented toward givenness, but always, however obliquely presented throughout the 1920s, a way of participating in the creative unfolding of the site of Being’s happening.

I argue that there is a confluence of authenticity and inauthenticity inherent to the structure of average everydayness in Being and Time. I support this reading by recasting Heidegger’s notion of fallenness in Being and Time in terms of its precursor, ruinance, which he introduces in his 1921–22 lecture course, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research. In this lecture course, Heidegger explains that ruinance is constituted by a dual movement of relucence and prestruction: the former, an intentional openness to the world; the latter, a securing that conceals that openness. While this dual movement is not expressed explicitly in these terms in Being and Time, I show that it is nevertheless tacitly operative in the structure of falling and that it grounds the duality of average everydayness. I frame this study around the debate on how Dasein can be authentic despite its fallenness, given that fallenness paradoxically renders Dasein essentially inauthentic.