In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

454 FRAMES
More demanding than the description of inauthenticity through concepts
like "the 'they'" or "idle talk" is, at least for Heidegger, the characterization
of authenticity-for he wants authenticity to be the absence of
any superfluous forms of behavior. [see Sobriety vs. Exuberance] The
simple difficulty of not having any salient points of reference in order to
describe authenticity may have persuaded Heidegger to focus mainly on
silence in the passages concerning this topic. But since silence could be
confused with muteness, he had to insist that only those who have
something to say can "keep silent." Under this condition, silence appears
as an authentic-and paradoxical-"mode of discoursing" (Modus des
Redens), and, even more important, as "genuine potentiality-forhearing"
(das echte Horenkonnen).63 The following random evocation
of things that one might hear before shifting to the existentially deeper
attitude of "hearkening" (horchen) constitutes one of the more remarkable
irruptions of contemporary everydayness into the philosophical
discourse of Sein und Zeit. Without introducing any systematic distinctions,
Heidegger alludes to two different registers of things to be heard,
one of them produced by technology, and the other (so to speak) heavily
authentic: "What we 'first' hear is never noises or complexes of sounds,
but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the regiment on the
march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling."64
But the culminating mode of authenticity, the attitude which silence
and hearkening facilitate, the position, finally, that constitutes "mineness"
and can redeem Dasein from its "fallenness to the 'they,'" is
resoluteness (Entschlossenheit).65 Resoluteness is the disposition to project
oneself onto the world, a disposition to act (although, as we have
seen, Heidegger carefully avoids the word handeln)-a disposition, however,
that is permeated by a complete awareness Dasein's nullity
(Nichtigkeit) and of its primordial guilt (Schuld). Resoluteness seems to
be the willingness to act in situations which one would normally characterize
as situations of undecidability; it is the willingness to accept the
nullity and tragedy of human existence-and to act in spite of them. The
pathos with which Heidegger invests the notion of resoluteness reminds
one of the aesthetic halo with which the Conservative Revolution surrounded
the concept of Tat. [see Action vs. Impotence, Action = Impotence
(Tragedy)] For readers in the 1920s, further associations with the
different conceptual connections and extensions of Heidegger's authen-