that it must grasp and understand as its own to a greater or lesser degree. Or in the deficient mode, it has not yet grasped itself or has already lost itself. First and foremost, existence has usually not yet achieved itself or has not yet found itself (during its youth, for example). Or it has lost itself, perhaps even at the most vital point of its life. Existence can have lost itself—and not yet have found itself—only insofar as existence, in its very being, is mine, i.e., my possible authentic existence. The two modes of authenticity and inauthenticity are grounded in the fact that existence as such is mine.

What is more, the inauthenticity of existence does not refer to less being or an inferior grade of being. Rather, inauthenticity precisely can indicate existence in its full concretion—its many activities, its liveliness, its interestedness, its ability to enjoy—in all of which it concretely lives and moves. For the most part—and this is important—existence comports itself neither in the mode of authenticity nor in that of simply being lost, but instead in a remarkable indifference. That, in turn, is not nothing but something [230] positive—the averageness of existence, which we call “everydayness,” and which is especially difficult to understand categorially in its structure and in the meaning of its being. I have said something about this in earlier courses and will not go into it here.

In this connection, we need to understand that the possibility of inauthenticity and its dominant role is comprehensible only in terms of the structure of existence. As we said, existence is being in the world. When we pointed out this structure we emphasized right off that it mostly takes the form of familiarity with the world. That is to say, concern loses itself in its world and gets determined primarily in terms of the world it is involved with. We must remember that this form of concern as familiarity with the world, which we can now characterize as inauthentic concern about things, is a fundamental way that existence is. We go into this phenomenon precisely because our a-priori-having operates chiefly in the arena of statements about the world. Natural, casual statements that we make fall within such statements about things we meet in the world, and these statements arise from concern about and dealings with the world. These statements are the precise focus of our reflections, or rather the ur-temporality of these statements. To that end, we said we must first acquire the horizon in which such a comportment—a specific statement—operates. Now we have clarified this horizon, at least in preliminary fashion.

Concern in the form of a concern that is involved in the world is a specific mode of care itself. The fact that we have given the name “inauthentic existence” to such involvement in the world does not mean that existence annihilates itself (so to speak) in its being when it loses itself. No, it means that existence, insofar as it is a concerned absorption