(a) Provide a critical account of Heidegger's Being-in-the-world and discuss the problem of 'authenticity' in the context of…

(a) Heidegger: Being-in-the-world and authenticity

Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein): Dasein, the being for whom its own Being is an issue, is not a subject facing a world of objects (against Descartes and Husserl). It is always already involved in a world of meaning.

• Equipment is first encountered as ready-to-hand (zuhanden), a hammer in use within a web of references (for nailing, for building, for shelter), and only in breakdown as present-at-hand (vorhanden), an object of theory.
• “In” means dwelling and concern, not spatial containment. World is a totality of significance.
• Dasein is Being-with (Mitsein) others, and its structure is care (Sorge): thrownness (facticity), projection (existence) and falling.

Authenticity:

• Everyday Dasein is absorbed in the They (das Man): idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity, doing what “one” does. This is inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit), a flight from oneself.
• Anxiety (Angst) has no object, it reveals Being-in-the-world as such and breaks the hold of das Man.
• Being-towards-death: death is Dasein’s ownmost, non-relational, certain and indefinite possibility. Anticipating it individualises Dasein.
• The call of conscience summons Dasein to resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), owning its choices within its situation. This is authenticity (Eigentlichkeit, literally “ownness”).

Critical assessment:

• Strength: it overcomes the subject-object split and shows that meaning arises from practical engagement.
• Authenticity has no content: Heidegger says it is not a moral ideal, yet it gives no criterion for what to choose. Adorno (The Jargon of Authenticity) calls it empty pathos, and Heidegger’s own 1933 political choice shows resoluteness can attach to anything.
• Levinas: the ethical relation to the Other is neglected in favour of one’s own death. Sartre makes authenticity a matter of radical freedom, which Heidegger avoids.
• Inauthenticity is called a primary state of everyday life, so whether authentic existence is ever stably attainable remains unclear.

(b) Aristotle: identity and causes as processes

Identity: for Aristotle, what a thing is (to ti en einai, essence) is its form (eidos), and a primary substance (ousia) is a compound of form and matter (hylomorphism). A thing stays the same through change because its form persists while its matter and accidents change. Socrates remains Socrates whether pale or tanned.

Causes as processes: the four causes (aitia) explain change (kinesis), which is “the actuality of the potential as such” (Physics III).

• Material: the bronze, the acorn’s matter.
• Formal: the shape of the statue, the form of the oak.
• Efficient: the sculptor, the parent oak.
• Final: the purpose, the mature oak.

Consonance:

• In natural things formal, efficient and final cause coincide: the form of the oak is what drives the acorn’s growth and the end towards which it grows. Identity is not a static label but form actualising itself (entelecheia).
• Potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia) link the two: the acorn is potentially an oak and is identified by what it is becoming.
• So the view is consonant: identity through change is explained by the same form that acts as cause. Tension: in the Categories, identity belongs to the individual substance, while in Metaphysics Z it belongs to form, raising the question whether form is universal or particular. Artefacts (the ship of Theseus) also show that identity of form and of matter can come apart.

(c) Spinoza: substance and pantheism

Substance (Ethics I, definition 3): “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself”, needing no other concept for its conception.

• It is self-caused (causa sui), infinite, indivisible and necessarily existing.
• Two substances cannot share an attribute, and God, having infinite attributes, exists necessarily. So there is only one substance, God or Nature (Deus sive Natura).
• Attributes: what the intellect perceives as the essence of substance. There are infinitely many, but we know two, thought and extension.
• Modes: finite things (bodies, ideas) are affections of substance, “whatever is, is in God” (I, proposition 15).

Does this lead to pantheism?

• For: God is not a transcendent creator acting by will but the immanent cause of all things (I, 18). Everything follows from God’s nature by necessity. Hence the label pantheism and the charge of atheism in his time.
• Qualification: Spinoza distinguishes natura naturans (God as active substance and attributes) from natura naturata (the modes). God is identical with the former, and the world of modes is in God, not equal to God. Since God has infinite attributes, God exceeds the known world. Some therefore call the view panentheism.
• Spinoza’s God is impersonal, without purpose or emotion, so it is not religious pantheism of a personal kind either.

My view: Spinoza’s doctrine does lead to pantheism in the sense that God and Nature are one reality with nothing outside God, but it is a rationalist, immanent pantheism, distinct from both theism and materialism.