Authenticity and Non-Authenticity of Life in the Light of Philosophers and a Writer: Heidegger, Sartre and Tolstoy

Abstract

Thus, Ivan’s view of life and death in those moments when the sand in the hourglass is inexorably flowing into the lower half and no one will turn the glass over again, not even God, combines Heidegger’s “they” and Sartre’s model of bad faith. He is filled with the bitter realization that—both in private life and in his official life—he has deceived himself and submitted to the demands of being-with-one-another in a community, and that he has lived as society expected and required him to live. The change that Ivan Ilyich experiences in the final hours of his life could and must be characterized as follows: 1. Death is for me the own-most possibility of existence. In the possibility of and openness towards death, my Dasein brings itself back to itself from its lostness in the “they.” Death is revealed as the most authentic possibility. 2. Death is a nonrelational possibility and touches my Da-sein in its authenticity. This means that it unbinds me and separates me from every relation with others. I can substitute no one in death, and neither can others substitute me. The relation with death is for me unique, one-off, unrepeatable, one alone—my death is mine alone, my own. This relation with the self cannot be treated like the relation between two links. 3. Death as a possibility not-to-bebypassed. Death is the unsurpassable (place, end) possibility of existence. Death is, in a way, the furthest reach of existence as a possibility-of-being; it is the extreme, highest and unsurpassable able-to-be. Sartre’s model appears to be more realistic and acceptable, above all, because irrationality is inextricably rooted in the self-conscious subject. The subject knows to some extent that it is deceiving itself with a given course of action, yet it complacently surrenders to this self-deception and deliberately ignores the choice or alternative it has before it. The important thing in Sartre is the defense of the view that as subjects we are, as it were, condemned to freedom.