Thinking over Heidegger’s work “Being and Time”, I am coming back again and again to the setting of authenticity. Contrasts are continually made between authentic and inauthentic, resoluteness and everyday-ness. Fleeing in the face of thrown nullity according to Heidegger is being dragged along in the present. Heidegger’s setting is one’s ownmost, the possibility for one taking hold of one’s existence instead of being tossed about to and fro. The call one must heed, ‘to be’ authentically, is toward a kind of rootedness, resolute standing in the face of thrown nullity. A power rooted in the wellspring of authenticity maintains itself actively and not passively as in the they-self. The stark there-is-ness can be faced without fleeing via authentic resoluteness.

For Levinas, what we flee in the face of is not thrown nullity but the other. The face of the other refuses our power over it, our authentic and resolute empowerment. The other is an absolute end to mine-ness as the possibility for authenticity and inauthenticity. The other refuses the neutrality of stark there-is-ness. The interruption of the other refuses my circumspection, my solicitude as evocative. To recover one’s authenticity through guilt is to appease one’s guilt, the debt which refuses payment and anarchically results in a kind of reverse substitution. When we substitute one, Being, for the other we thereby take on the guilt of murder. For Levinas, we are unable to be able in the alterity of the face of the other with a passivity beyond all passivity.

For Heidegger, we are powerless as inauthentic, fleeing thrown nullity and thereby inviting guilt which opens the possibility of authenticity. For Heidegger, in taking hold of one’s ownmost the other is the they- self in inauthenticity as fallen and being-with as the there of being (dasein) as authentic. In both cases the other is taken as constitutive of dasein. For Levinas, the other is transcendent to being, an absolute alterity which cannot be brought under the rubric of dasein‘s temporality in the structure of care (Sorge). The act of totalizing the other into ontology covers over the radical interruption of the other in a murderous act of auto-affection. History is the story of leveling off the rupture of the other.

The relentlessness of authenticity for Levinas may be more like the resoluteness for the there-is, the il ya. In declaring our freedom as mineness we obliterate any interruption of the other. My death as sacrifice in the face of the other is transformed in Heidegger as the authentic possibility of the impossibility of death as thrown nullity. Resoluteness, given by the possibility of Being, can face sheer is-ness in taking hold of its ownmost possibility for authenticity. Ontos, being , is the final banishment of alterity and conquering moment of vision for what is left, nothingness emerging as metaphysic, as suspended over nothingness, as the proper mode (dwelling, abode perhaps) of mineness. For Levinas, metaphysics taken over historically by ontology nevertheless retains a trace of the desire for the other.

What rationality as the Concept (Begriff) failed to conquer in absolutizing self-determinination, Heidegger lays hold of in the existential of Being as authentic. Yet, what remains in such empowerments, archical, synchronicities of Idea or Being, loses the radical and unequivocal interruption of the face of the other in a solemn neutrality which goes counter to Ethics in Levinas and denies any possibility for the impossibility of Being in the face of the other.