Is This Really My Life?

Kierkegaard and Heidegger in Good Times and Bad

“Is this really my life?” The question may arise after many years of work, care and responsibility. We look back and wonder where our own voice went amid all the expectations. The same question can take on a different and more painful meaning for someone who has lived with violence and abuse: How much of my life have I been allowed to decide for myself? Can I trust my own experience? Do I have the right to want something different?

These experiences are different. Examining the choices we have made is one thing; trying to regain a freedom to act that others have violated is another. Yet both experiences concern the relationship between the life we live and our ability to recognise it as our own.

For almost fifty years, I have worked with issues of violence and abuse, both as a professional social worker and as an academic. Over the past forty years, I have also immersed myself in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. I found a home in their thought. Their ideas accompanied me in my work and helped me along the path towards a doctorate on abuse and a professorship in the same field.

Their personal crises have also mattered to me. They write about existence with a seriousness I recognise. Being human can be very difficult. It has meant something to read thinkers who make room for this difficulty.

The word “really” in the title takes us straight into Heidegger’s philosophy. His term Eigentlichkeit is usually translated into English as “authenticity”. In Norwegian, it is often rendered as egentlighet, linking it directly to egentlig, the word translated here as “really”. The German term carries a connection to what is one’s own. The question “Is this really my life?” therefore touches on something central to his thinking: How can I take up my existence as my own?

This does not imply a pure, untouched inner self simply waiting to be discovered. We already live in a world with others, within a language, among habits and expectations. It is in this world that we must find a way of existing for which we can answer.

In §27 of Being and Time, Heidegger examines what he calls das Man, usually translated as “the they”. We know what one does. We know which ambitions count, what one ought to put up with and what a successful life should look like. These expectations rarely have a single source. They pass from person to person, and we pass them on ourselves.

Even rebellion can follow an established pattern. We are supposed to be independent, express ourselves and break with expectations. We can follow the formula for being different as obediently as we follow the formula for fitting in.

Towards the end of §27, Heidegger emphasises that authentic selfhood involves a change in our way of existing within “the they”. It is not an existence outside the shared world. We continue to live with others, use a common language and participate in everyday life. The task is to relate to our possibilities without allowing the impersonal “they” to take over the entire decision.

Kierkegaard raises a related question, placing greater emphasis on the individual’s responsibility and relationship with God. The crowd can give us somewhere to hide. The fact that many people hold the same view does not relieve anyone of the task of examining what they themselves endorse.

In The Sickness unto Death, published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, this task is explored through despair. We can despair by not willing to be ourselves. We can also despair by willing to be ourselves in a way that rejects our fundamental dependence. Self-effacement and defiant self-sufficiency become two different difficulties in our relationship with the self.

For Kierkegaard, the self finds its true ground in God. The religious dimension belongs to the argument itself. My practical appropriation of the text begins with the question it opens up: How can a person acknowledge themselves without having to pretend that they created, or can sustain, their entire existence alone?

A pattern can make the question of freedom to act more concrete. Someone living with repeated violations begins to organise the day around the other person’s reactions. Words are weighed before they are spoken. An arrangement to see a friend is cancelled because the consequences may be too difficult. Personal wishes are postponed until the atmosphere feels safer. Gradually, this adaptation can become so deeply established that the question “What do I want?” is scarcely asked. Attention is bound to another question: “What will happen if I do it?”

From the outside, this may look like indecision. From within, it may be a painstaking effort to reduce danger. Silence, compliance and the constant reading of the other person must be understood in light of the conditions under which they developed.

Shame can narrow this freedom still further. “Why didn’t I say anything?” “Why did I stay?” The person subjected to abuse may begin to turn the accusation against themselves and wish to escape the person they feel they have become.

Here, Kierkegaard’s description of despair as not willing to be oneself comes close to a painful human experience. The connection must be drawn with care. Shame following abuse is not simply the same as despair in his religious sense. Nor does his analysis explain how violence and power operate. It can nevertheless help us express how suffering may also damage our very relationship with ourselves: Our own history, reactions and vulnerability become difficult to bear.

At this point, a person needs to be met in a way that does not leave self-blame with the final word. Responsibility for the abuse lies with the person who committed it. Reactions that arose under pressure must be understood before they are judged. The possibility of experiencing life as one’s own can begin when someone takes one’s experience seriously and makes room for a boundary: I do not want this. I need help with this. This is what I want for my life.

This is a point on which I want to stand firm. The call to be oneself can become yet another accusation when directed at people without understanding what they have had to survive. Before asking why someone did not choose differently, we must examine what it was actually possible to choose.

Here, my experience of social work and research brings me into conversation with these philosophers, and also takes me beyond them. It is insufficient to speak of freedom without also asking about safety, finances, dependence and power. A person may need protection and people they can trust long before they have the capacity to formulate a new direction in life.

Reading Kierkegaard and Heidegger must therefore leave room for experience to answer back.

This also applies to the question of duty. Someone who has cared for children, worked to support a family or looked after an ill spouse has not thereby neglected their own life. Care can be one of the deepest expressions of who we are. Staying can be an act of freedom.

We need to distinguish between a commitment we can affirm as our own and a subordination that gradually makes our own voice inaudible. From the outside, they may look alike. Both can involve hard work, sacrifice and long days. The difference becomes visible when we ask whether there is room for boundaries, protest and reciprocity.

Can I say that I am tired? Can I ask for help? Can I say no without being met with threats or humiliation? Such questions bring philosophy down to earth, where freedom takes on concrete conditions.

Then come the days when the familiar falls apart. Illness, loss, a relationship ending, a task completed. The role that once gave us direction no longer sustains us in the same way. At such times, the question of my own life can become difficult to avoid.

Kierkegaard and Heidegger help us understand why such disruptions can be accompanied by unease. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is closely connected to the possibility inherent in freedom. For Heidegger, it can reveal how little of existence is as self-evident as our everyday habits lead us to believe.

Their inquiries give us language for aspects of existing. They offer no guarantee that suffering will lead to insight. Pain can also exhaust us, confuse us and close off the world. A person in crisis needs care without first having to make the crisis meaningful.

The task of living cannot be handed over to a theory. We must face the days ourselves, even when understanding falls short.

Death has a decisive place in Heidegger’s thought. In §53 of Being and Time, he examines Vorlaufen zum Tode, anticipating one’s own death as a possibility. Here, death is more than a future event. It is the possibility that all my possibilities will cease. No one can take over this finitude for me.

Anticipating death means keeping this possibility open in our understanding of our own existence. It loosens the grip of the assumption that my life can be fully understood through what “one” does and expects. The analysis concerns how existence is mine and finite; it is not a formula for using time more effectively.

When I let this lead to questions about whom I want to give my time to, which conversations I do not want to postpone and what I still want to attempt, this is my practical appropriation of Heidegger. I am carrying the thought further into lived, everyday life.

There, the word “later” takes on a different resonance. Later, I will say what has long remained unspoken. Later, I will make room for what matters. A long life makes it clear that some possibilities disappear while we wait.

Some losses cannot be repaired. Certain paths are closed. We can still ask what is possible within the life that is here now. A conversation can become more honest. An old interest can be given time. A necessary boundary can be set. Care for others can be accompanied by care for oneself.

This is also where we must ask the ethical question that Heidegger’s analysis does not adequately answer: The fact that an action is mine, that I have chosen it resolutely and claimed it as my own, does not make it good.

Distance from “the they” offers no moral guarantee. What is customary can contain both cowardice and decency, and a break with convention can lead in many directions. We need to examine the substance of our choices: Who is protected? Who is placed at risk? What power am I exercising, and how do I answer for it?

Heidegger’s support for Nazism makes this objection unavoidable. His political failure bears on the question of what philosophy’s concepts help us see and what they leave unresolved. An analysis of authenticity and resoluteness requires an ethical examination of what a person actually resolves to do.

My work with violence and abuse makes it impossible to treat this as a side issue. Human dignity cannot depend on the strength of someone else’s conviction. Responsibility requires us to allow another person’s life and boundaries to matter in our own actions.

Kierkegaard’s thinking about love of the neighbour provides a different starting point for this examination. The other person makes demands on me and sets limits to the idea that my life is concerned only with my own self-expression. Here, there is a connection with the practice of care: I also become myself through the way I respond to another human being.

Reading a thinker over many years also means asking more of him than he offers. I can be grateful for an insight and reject actions or conclusions with all the clarity required. A long relationship with a body of writing gains its value through this conversation.

These thinkers have accompanied me between practice and research, and their questions have been tested against what the work has taught me. What does it mean to be a self? What do dependence and vulnerability mean for freedom? How can we live responsibly with what we can never fully control?

The good days have their place in this too. Existence contains moments when we can be present without constantly examining ourselves. A conversation allowed to take its time. Work that feels meaningful. A meal with people we love. Joy needs room.

On the difficult days, reading can offer a place where difficulty is allowed to exist. We are released from the demand to master it immediately. We can find words for something we would otherwise face more alone.

Is this really my life?

The question is now joined by others. Where was I able to be myself? Where did my freedom to act diminish? What have I given to others, and what do I still need to make room for in my own life?

I can be grateful for what came to be and grieve for what never had the chance to develop. I can acknowledge my choices and recognise that some were made under conditions beyond my control. A life does not need to be acquitted or condemned as a single case.

Perhaps this is part of what a long companionship with these thinkers has given me: a sense of belonging in which the difficulty of life is taken seriously, and the question of how we should live remains open.

For me, it also becomes a question of what we can do for one another: How can my way of being present make it more possible for another person to feel that this life is their own?