Whatever Heidegger’s notion of authenticity, therefore, it involves an account of the self according to which the most authentic form of existence involves “being one’s own” in something like the Augustinian sense of being true to the basic ontological features of what one is. Heidegger disagrees with Augustine, of course, about what those basic ontological features are. But the notion of being true to them, of being authentic or “being one’s own,” is similar. Whatever this account of the self amounts to in detail, it is clearly very different from what one finds in the early modern philosophers of the Enlightenment period.

¶ 2:05 AM