After Authenticity: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Lure of the Ordinary

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Review of David Egan, The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)

The first thing that struck me during my initial reading of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was his claim, in the preface, that the three most important philosophers of the 20th Century were Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey. That claim seemed so outrageous I concluded that, in some sense, it had to be true. One of my minor philosophical obsessions over the years was to determine why that might be so.

There are many commentaries that have also attempted to do this, but David Egan’s book The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday is the most successful that I have encountered yet. The book’s axis is the claim that the single most important and innovative feature that Heidegger and Wittgenstein share is a quest to make philosophy an authentic human endeavor after the collapse of its traditional forms. While this is an explicit part of Heidegger’s program, Egan argues that it is implicit in Wittgenstein, and in fact more successful, since Wittgenstein shed some vestiges of the grand philosophical tradition that Heidegger unwittingly retained, despite his ambitions at overcoming them.