Authenticity: From resoluteness to releasement

Heidegger's 'later' philosophy is often seen as irreconcilable with his early work, in particular, Being and Time. Well-rehearsed criticisms juxtapose notions such as "resoluteness" in Being and Time, for example, with the "releasement"/Gelassenheit of the 'later' work. This dissertation emphasizes, conversely, the structural and thematic coherence of Heidegger's movement from authenticity and related concepts in his 'early' work to the search for an 'authentic' free relation to the world, in particular the technological world, as captured by the term "releasement" in the 'later' work. The early focus is on the context of the discussion of authenticity and related themes in Being and Time which are frequently misread by critics keen to import a disjuncture between an alleged voluntarist humanism of Being and Time and the supposedly 'anti-humanist' later writings. From there we move to Chapter One of Introduction to Metaphysics where Heidegger carefully aligns his project with the discussion of authenticity in Being and Time while indicating ways in which the appeal to authenticity can be recast on a world-historical scale. Heidegger's analyses echo some of the concerns with equipmentality and unlimited publicness in Being and Time and also point the way toward the mature reflections on the current 'destining' of being as we find it in his seminal essay on technology. A close reading of "The Question Concerning Technology" follows as Heidegger examines the manner in which Gestell has become the hallmark of this particular epoch in the history of being. Heidegger can again be understood as looking to retrieve some level of authentic existence in the technological age by addressing the question of how being reveals itself through us in this way and how the hidden dimension of that giving tends to get covered over or concealed. Finally, we look at some of Heidegger's self-interpretations where he deliberately invokes elements of Being and Time by way of unpacking features of his later thought.