On the Possibility of Authentic Movement: A Philosophical Investigation

Rona Cohen

INTRODUCTION

Imagine that you are a scientist or an explorer from outer space. You descend to Earth in the hope of finding new civilizations and understanding their culture. You quickly notice, among other things, that irrespective of whether you look at humans, trees, or animals, everything is in motion: people stroll down the street, cats climb on trees, trees move by the force of the wind, and, if you look closely enough through the lens of a microscope, you will see the movement of atoms.¹ But what is the nature of movement? Do all entities move in the same way? If we exclude kinesis, which is understood to involve a change of place, does movement have any existential significance? Is there a movement that is specific for the type of Being which we are? Furthermore, is there a movement that that is specific to each one of us?

Before approaching the question of the meaning of existential movement, let us look into our repertoire of movements. It is of course different for each of us, ranging from banal, instrumental or functional movements (e.g., reaching our hand to grasp an object), to the movement of dancers on the extreme end of the scale, who move in a way in which only a few of us are capable. In between lies the bulk of our repertoire: movements we imitated, identified with (consciously or unconsciously), learnt, and movements that are given to us by way of our habitus, in the sense intended by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: “embodied dispositions that are shared by people with similar background” (Lizardo, 2004, p. 375). This background includes such identifiers as social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender, education, and profession and it reflects the lived reality in which individuals are socialized. Thus, the habitus represents the way group culture and personal history shape the body, and as a result, shape the way we think and act. But is there a movement that belongs to each one of us existentially—that belongs to me as “/ am", that is, prior to my movements as “I am a professor of philosophy”? If existence is prior to any of its characterizations, could there be a movement that is mine in an existential sense, before my movements are historically and socially situated in ways that are given to me? That is, could movement be an existentiale—a mode of being! Moreover, could we understand the meaning of Being by appealing to movement? If so, what would that movement consist in?

When Mary Starks Whitehouse came upon such movement she called it “authentic”. This is because it was a movement that expressed a “truth of a kind unlearned”, that is, movement that was genuine and belonged to a person and was found in the body, by contrast with a movement that was acquired, or, as Whitehouse put it, worn “like a dress or a coat” (Whitehouse, 1963/1999, p. 53). This chapter will address Whitehouse’s insight vis-à-vis Martin Heidegger’s notion of authenticity developed in his magnum opus Being and Time (1927). Before addressing the question of authenticity, and whether—philosophically speaking—movement could be authentic at all, a very brief introduction to Being and Time is required.

HUMAN BEING AS DASEIN

Being and Time centers upon the question of the meaning of Being: what is it to be? According to Heidegger, human beings, unlike other kinds of beings, such as trees, cats, and tables, differ in their inodes of existence. Put differently, human beings exist differently from other kinds of entities. Being and Tune is a study of the kind of being we ourselves are—a kind of being Heidegger designates with the term Dasein, which in German literally means both “existence” and “being-there” (Da-sein). In designating the type of being we ourselves are as “Dasein”, Heidegger names the human being after its essence, namely, existence, thus “expressing not its ‘what’ (as if it were a table, house or tree) but its Being” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, §9, p. 67). Heidegger’s method for exploring the question of being begins with tracing Dasein & existentials, i.e., Dasein s modes of being. This raises questions as to what belongs to Dasein s ontological structure (such as, for example, the fact that it is a being-towards-death, and a being-in-the-world), by contrast with what belongs to its personhood, which includes among other things its background, history, preferences, and psychological dispositions. Heidegger designates this latter dimension as “the ontic”, whose domain is properly explored by anthropology, psychology, biology, and more (§10, p. 71).² Unlike other entities, Dasein is an entity that is concerned with its own Being, it is the entity that asks, interrogates, and is able to understand the meaning of its Being. This mode of inquiry is itself a mode of being “for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves” (p. 27).

BOX 1 IN SUMMARY

According to Heidegger, the world of entities is divided into three types of beings, one of them is Dasein, the type of being human beings are. Other types of beings include instrumental objects (ready-to-hand) and objects of nature (present-at-hand). While ready-to-hand (objects) have properties, Dasein has inodes of being (existentials) such as being-towards-death and being-with. Even asking the question of Being is an existentiale, since Dasein is the only type of being for whom the question of Being is an issue. Existentials are ontological, which is to say, given to Dasein by the sheer fact that it is, while Existentiells are ontic and are not given to us by the fact that we are, e.g., by our existence but rather by virtue of our biology, environment, culture and so on. While the former are the subject matter of philosophical study, the latter are a subject matter of the sciences, psychology, anthropology, and so on.

Authenticity: A Heideggerian Perspective

We all want to be authentic. And we all want to be true to ourselves, making our own choices freely. Or do we? Surprising though it may seem, Heidegger’s answer to these questions is that the opposite is the case: Daseins fundamental tendency is to turn away from itself, to fall (leifallen). As Heidegger explains:

Falling docs not express any negative evaluation, but is used to signify that Dasein is proximally and for the most part alongside the “world” of its concern. This “absorption in” has mostly the character of Being-lost in the publicness of “the they” (Das Man). Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away (abgefalkn) from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self and has fallen into the “world”’.

(Heidegger, 1927/1962, §38, p. 220)

According to Heidegger, individuality “is not given for human, though all humans have a ‘potentiality-for-Being’ individuals” (Carman, 2005, p. 15). In our everyday existence, the human being as Dasein is not itself: it is proximally and for the most part the “They”, or a “they-self”, “doing what everyone would do in the common circumstances of life into which we are thrown” (p. 15). In this mode of being, our capacity for being individuals—that is, entities who are free to choose their own possibilities, to own up to what they are, to their existence—remains concealed. In being “absorbed in” the world, as Magda King remarks:

Dasein understands himself not from the possibilities of its being, (which belong to each Dasein singly and uniquely) but from the worldish possibilities among other selves. In his everydayness, Dasein measures his own self by what the others are and have, by what they have achieved and failed to achieve in the world. This provides Dasein with a false sense of security and releases it from the burden of thinking or choosing for itself.

(King, 2001, p. 81)

Before addressing the concept of das Man, we immediately see that for Heidegger the question of “being-with” is intimately connected to the question of “being-Self”. According to Macann, the recognition of being-Self is both significant and paradoxical. It is significant in that it implies a concern with what it means for Dasein to be itself. Meanwhile, it is paradoxical since the aim of Heidegger’s chapter is to demonstrate that, proximally and for the most part, Dasein is precisely not zta^f(Macann, 1992, p. 217).

BOX 2 IN SUMMARY

Although we’d like to think of ourselves as beings who strive for authenticity, Heidegger in fact argues that our fundamental tendency is to turn away from ourselves, he calls this mode of inauthenticity “Falling” or absorption. In its absorption in the world, Dasein is able to avoid standing authentically towards its own existence and in this way avoid the recognition and the responsibility it has towards itself. In being inauthentic, we understand ourselves not from our own possibilities but from the possibilities that are already given to us, structured, by society. This does not mean that when we make choices related to social issues we cannot be authentic; it simply means that when we let others choose for us or we accept at face value the norms and ideals of society (as Das Man), we risk losing our individuality, thus renouncing our unique and irreplaceable existence. However, “Falling” or being inauthentic is not a negative evaluation, or a tendency which only “weak” people have; it is a mode of being (existential) belonging to the type of being which we are, Dasein. Authenticity' and inauthenticity coexist.