Temporal being and the authentic self

The central concern of this project is twofold: firstly to supply conceptually plausible answers to Heidegger’s unanswered questions regarding the temporality of Being, which he raised at the very end of Being and Time. Secondly through this examination the aim is to explore the process of discovery and sense of authentic being as uncovered and developed by Heidegger. Overall this project is situated methodologically within Process Philosophy, and it is from this perspective that draws attention to the role of human agency in which individuals are spatiotemporally construed in terms of Space-Time-Event-Motion (STEM) entities.1 Heidegger situates Dasein (human existence) in a temporal stream moving towards the nothingness of death. For Heidegger the spatiotemporal nature of one’s life is understood from the standpoint of Being-in-the-world, as an engaged participant, coexistent with the world, so that contextually it is through this engagement in recognition of this facticity or thrownness that one may come to recognise one’s own authentic self. This discovery, however, brings to light a tension between the individualistic sense of authentic self and the coexistent Being-in-the-world they-self (Das Man) that emerges from Heidegger’s analysis. Somewhat problematic then is the coexistent phenomenological recognition that one does not live in isolation and as such one may question what of the contingent, constraining and influencing factors that shape one’s sense of self particularly against the backdrop of self-other relations. Part of this analysis therefore is to provide the departure points of critique to later consider authentic inter-relations of community