Autenticidade significa um Ser-no-mundo, autopossuído, temporal-histórico, que se preocupa consigo mesmo. Na resolução antecipatória, o indivíduo revela a sua finitude e apropria-se das suas próprias possibilidades. Estas possibilidades estão ligadas à herança em que se deve enraizar. A herança, paradoxalmente, não está atrás de nós; está diante de nós como o nosso futuro. Existir autenticamente para o futuro significa liberar a herança para uma mudança proporcional às exigências do presente. Existência autêntica significa temporalidade autêntica, o momento de visão (Augenblick) em que o passado, o presente e o futuro de um indivíduo se geram numa grande espiral. A vida de um indivíduo adquire continuidade e profundidade à medida que ele repete as suas resoluções. Em cada Augenblick, ele adquire uma compreensão mais profunda do que significa “ser”. Assim, a temporalidade autêntica é um acontecimento ontológico e não apenas uma experiência pessoal.
Authenticity means self-possessed, temporal-historical Being-in-the-world, which is concerned about itself. In anticipatory resoluteness, an individual discloses his finitude and appropriates his own possibilities. These possibilities are bound up with the heritage in which he must root himself. Heritage, paradoxically, does not lie behind us; it stands before us as our future. To exist toward the future authentically means freeing heritage for a change commensurate with the demands of the present. Authentic existence means authentic temporality, the moment of vision (Augenblick) in which an individual’s past, present, and future generate themselves in a great spiral. An individual’s life acquires continuity and depth as he repeats his resolutions. In each Augenblick, he gains a more profound understanding of what it means “to be.” Hence, authentic temporality is an ontological event, not merely a personal experience.
Being and Time’s analysis of authenticity is so appealing because it deals in part with the universal problem of individuation. Although the book’s major intention was to demonstrate the relation between human temporality and the event of Being (unconcealment), it was largely received as an existentialist manifesto favoring individual self-actualization. Heidegger’s readers seized on the powerful dramatic theme of authenticity, to the neglect of the overriding ontological (134) theme. Dismayed by this reception of his work, he set out to emphasize his ontological concerns. For our study, it is important to note that he did not abandon his interest in authenticity, but approached this phenomenon from a different perspective. It might be more accurate to say that he assumed the perspective which was to have been developed in the never-published second-half of Being and Time. In that portion of the book, he intended to describe the important changes in the “history of Being.” In the 1930s he devoted himself to understanding two aspects of this history. First, he tried to describe the subtle but crucial shifts in Western man’s understanding of Being. Second, he sought to explain how these changes have occurred. His interpretation of man’s relation to the history of Being resembles Hegel’s interpretation of man’s relation to the history of Absolute Spirit. Hegel claimed that the real “meaning” of history is not found in human achievements (whether individual or collective), but in the stages achieved by Absolute Spirit on its way toward total self-consciousness. New stages in this history are introduced by world-historical individuals who may think they are acting solely for personal reasons, but who are in fact fated to play roles in a drama whose importance transcends their individual interests. Heidegger, too, regarded history, not as a human event, but as a cosmic one — the history of the revelation of the Being of beings. By suggesting in places that history involves the self-actualization of the possibilities of individuals or historical peoples, Being and Time concealed the transcendent and historical nature of the event of Being. To correct this suggestion, Heidegger later explained that authenticity is not a matter of personal achievement or arbitrary choice, but is a matter of fate. Authentic individuals are those chosen as sites for new, historically-decisive revelations of Being. His mature version of authenticity minimized voluntarism (the will to self-actualization) and anthropocentrism (interpreting the understanding of Being as a human possession, instead of as a gift). Authenticity happens to an individual when he is released from self-will so he can be open for what transcends him: the Being of beings. At times, however, in discussing the authentic world-historical individual, Heidegger still referred to the struggle required to accept the role of being open for revelation. To the very end, he continued to describe authenticity in terms of a radical alteration (135) of temporality. World-historical heroism occurs when an individual overcomes the egoism which threatens to prevent this crucial alteration from happening. The later version of authenticity, then, lacks much of the “existentialist” flavor which belongs to the voluntaristic version found in Being and Time. The topic of this chapter is the way Heidegger developed Being and Time’s notion of the Augenblick as the way an individual is chosen to be cleared for a new manifestation of Being.