Everything is thus arranged so as to rule out as indecent any attempt to apply to the text the violence whose legitimacy Heidegger himself recognized when he applied it to Kant, and which alone allows one to ’grasp the sense beyond the obstinate silence of language’. Any exposition of the originary thought which rejects the inspired paraphrase of the untranslatable idiolect is condemned in advance by the guardians of the sanctuary.25 The only way of saying what words mean to say, when they refuse to say innocently what they mean or, what amounts to the same thing, when they keep saying it but only indirectly, is to reduce the irreducible, to translate the untranslatable, to say what they mean in the naive terms which their primary function is precisely to deny. ‘Authenticity’ is not a naive designation of the exclusive quality of a socially designated ‘elite’. It indicates a universal potential - like ‘inauthenticity’ - but one which only really belongs to those who manage to appropriate it by apprehending it for what it is and at the same time by managing to ‘tear themselves away' from ‘inauthenticity’, a kind of original sin. thus stigmatized as a fault guilty of its own failing, since the chosen few are capable of being converted. This is clearly stated by Junger: ‘Whether to assume one’s own destiny, or to be treated like an object: that is the dilemma which everyone, nowadays, is certain to have to resolve, but to have to decide alone . .. Consider man in his pristine state of freedom, as created by God. He is not the exception, nor is he one of an elite. Far from it: for the free man is hidden within every man, and differences exist only in so far as each individual is able to develop that freedom which was his birthright.’26
Though equally free, human beings are unequal in their ability to use their freedom authentically and only an ‘elite’ can appropriate the opportunities which are universally available for acceding to the freedom of the ‘elite’. This ethical voluntarism - pushed to its limit by Sartre - converts the objective duality of social destinies into a duality of relations to existence, making authentic existence an ‘existential modification’ of the ordinary way of apprehending every-
day existence, that is, in plain speaking, a revolution in thought,27 When Heidegger makes authenticity begin with the perception of inauthenticity, in that moment of truth where Dasein is revealed through anxiety as projecting order into the world through its decision (a kind of Kierkegaardian ‘leap' into the unknown),** or, conversely, when he describes man's reduction to the state of an instrument, another way of apprehending 'everyday existence’, the way which ‘they’ adopt when they treat themselves as tools and ‘care about’ tools for their instrumental utility, and thus become instruments themselves, adapting themselves to others as an instrument adapts to other instruments, fulfilling a function which others could fulfil just as well and. once reduced in this way to the state of an interchangeable clement in a set. forget themselves in the fulfilment of their function - when Heidegger discusses existence in terms of this alternative, he reduces the objective duality of social conditions to the duality of the modes of existence they obviously encourage in a very unequal manner; and he thereby considers both those who ensure their access to ‘authentic’ existence and those who ‘abandon themselves’ to an ‘inauthentic’ existence to be responsible for what they are. the former for their 'resolution'31' in tearing themselves away from everyday existence in order to exploit their potential, the latter for their ’resignation’ which dooms them to ‘degradation’ and ‘social welfare’.
