In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING-IN-THE-WORLDS OF 1926 455
ticity/inauthenticity binarism must have abounded. In addition, the philosopher
himself spared no effort to make his own life seem like an
illustration of his notion of Eigentlichkeit. During the Marburg years, he
pretended that "silent walks through the surrounding forests" with his
famous colleague Paul Natorp were the only form of social contact he
cared about.66 If the silent promenades of these thinkers could be perceived
as elitist, "elite" definitely did not mean "intellectuals" or "academics"
for Heidegger. Rather, he seized every opportunity to express
his admiration for workers and Black Forest peasants.67 In his professional
life, therefore, Heidegger's goal to become an Ordinarius (and
thus part of the established academic elite) was not always easy to
reconcile with his resentful ambition to be-and to appear-different.
With more amusement than protest, the wife of his colleague Ernst
Cassirer (whom Heidegger must have seen as the incarnation of that
worldliness he decried) observed his effort to stand out as "authentic"
amid people whom he no doubt judged to be the elite of scribblers and
idle talkers, assembled on the occasion of an academic dinner party:
All the guests had arrived, the women in evening gowns, the men in
dinner suits. At a point when the dinner had been interrupted for some
time with seemingly endless speeches, the door opened, and an inconspicuous
little man came into the room, looking as awkward as a
peasant who had stumbled into a royal court. He had black hair and
dark piercing eyes, rather like some workman from southern Italy or
Bavaria; an impression which was soon confirmed by his regional accent.
He was wearing an old-fashioned black suit ... For me, what
seemed the most worrying thing was his deadly seriousness and his total
lack of a sense of humor.68
Carefully thought through as they were, the forms of Heidegger's selfpresentation
probably fed back into his philosophical discourse. This
could be how "being-at-home," as a concretization of being-in-theworld,
became an important systematic concept for Heidegger, who
wanted nothing so much as to stay at home. Since this would never be
his lot, however, being-at-home seems part of the inauthenticity of the
"they" and a reason for "tranquillized self-assurance. "69 Authentic
Dasein, in contrast, exposes itself to the "uncanniness" of the world, to