The Authenticity of the Ordinary (original) (raw)

The similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger are striking, the more so because they wrote in different styles and wrote from different traditions. Following in a path blazed by Karl-Otto Apel and Hubert Dreyfus, a number of scholars have found in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules and privacy useful fodder for fleshing out Heidegger's conception of Being-with. However, Heidegger finds a too-ready absorption in our shared public practices to be a signal feature of inauthenticity, raising the question of whether Wittgenstein's emphasis on the ordinary echoes the average everydayness of inauthentic Dasein. But far from insisting on the unshakeability of our ordinary practices, I claim, Wittgenstein emphasizes their ungroundedness. This emphasis on ungroundedness allows me to trace the moments in Wittgenstein’s appeal to ordinary language that parallel Heidegger’s description of anxiety, the uncannines that it discloses, and the authenticity of owning up to this uncanniness.