Volo ut sis: A reflection on love and authenticity through four scenes

Abstract

This paper suggests a correlation between Pindar’s exhortation on becoming who one is –interpreted here as authenticity–, and the phenomenon of love in the context of the existential analysis of Dasein in Being and Time. Following what Heidegger himself argues decades later in the Zollikon Seminars: Care, correctly understood, is not different from love. In order to ground the proposed reading of love in its key of authenticity, we will examine four scenes: Pindar, Nietzsche, St. Augustine and Heidegger. This “mise-en-scène” seeks to highlight and clarify the mutual belonging between authenticity and love, thus suggesting that any philosophical development that intends to make a systematic analysis of love must necessarily take into account the will that we find in lovers for their beloved to become who he or she truly is. At the same time, this prerogative has ontological implications that should not be left unnoticed, both for our interpretation of ourselves, and for the problem of the aforementioned prerogative regarding the transit that takes place between being and not-being –or between not-yet-being and be-coming. This suggests –without getting carried away by classical metaphysical distinctions, such as those of potency and act– a particular mode of unhiding, and a particular mode of ποίησις.