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Entanglement [Verfallen] is sometimes translated as “fallenness” or “falling prey” and it is our regular everyday way of being as a they-self in the world with others. Heidegger is a philosophical atheist. So he explicitly states that our fall is not “from a purer and higher” way of being. Nor does he mean that our fallenness is something like original sin or a fall from grace. Fallenness is just a regular habit pattern in our average everyday lives in which we ignore our own potential for being and have “fallen” into the world of others. We do what they do. We choose what they choose. Heidegger doesn’t want to say entanglement is good or bad. However, in my own reading it seems pretty clear that entanglement is inauthentic (that is, bad). It’s even tempting to say it’s a secular version of a fall from grace. Heidegger identifies three parts to entanglement: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.
Idle talk is a type of discourse (or language) and a part of our understanding and interpretation of the world. But it’s disconnected from the subjects of language and instead engages in casual fluffery. Idle talk is “groundless” and superficial. Heidegger writes, “what is spoken about as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so” (168). The strange aspect of idle talk is that in the telling it takes on a life of its own and “closes off” the original source that inspired the gossip in the first place. Heidegger distinguishes “genuine understanding” from this shallower “average understanding” that is the primary way we talk with others. Idle talk shapes our everyday being and “determines what and how one ‘sees'” (170). In other words, we take on a convenient public understanding of others [das Man] rather than come to our own deeper conclusions about the matter.
Curiosity is “a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered in perception” (170). That sounds like a good thing, right? Not in the way Heidegger means it. Curiosity is our puerile everydayness in seeking spectacle, entertainment, or “the pleasure of the eyes” without going deeper into genuine understanding. We perceive without really seeing:
“[Curiosity] takes care to see not in order to understand what it sees… but only in order to see. It seeks novelty only to leap from it again to another novelty” (172).
Suppose I point my telescope to an object in the night sky. I gesture to the eyepiece and invite you to take a look. You take a quick peek, say “wow!” and then ask me to show you some other objects. But then after a few more you get bored and find that your mind wanders to something else. This is what Heidegger means by curiosity. Curiosity levels everything down to mere amusement. Nothing really goes very deep. We are entertained but miss out on deeper truths and real understanding.
For example, you might have asked me what it was you were seeing. I might say it was the Andromeda Galaxy. You ask more questions. I realize I don’t know the answer. We find ourselves looking it up online or in a reference book. Soon we discover that the Andromeda Galaxy contains about a trillion stars, is 152,000 light years across, and that in a few billion years it will collide spectacularly with our own Milky Way Galaxy.
The third part of entanglement is ambiguity. “When, in everyday being with one another, we encounter things that are accessible to everybody and about which everyone can say everything, we can soon no longer decide what is disclosed in genuine understanding and what is not” (173). Ambiguity is the failure to distinguish between genuine understanding and idle talk. Gossip, rumors, hearsay, titillating stories, or social media conspiracy theories all become mixed and mingled with factual news or evidence-based conclusions. Dasein is usually embedded in its public being with others in such a way that it risks losing itself in ambiguity:
“The loudest idle talk and the most inventive curiosity keep the ‘business’ going, where everything happens in an everyday way, and basically nothing happens at all. Ambiguity is always tossing to curiosity what it seeks, and it gives to idle talk the illusion of having everything decided in it” (174).
Heidegger stresses that these aspects of entanglement are “implied in being-with-one-another, as thrown being-with-one-another in a world” (175). In other words, for us they are like water to a school of fish: pervasive, normative, and wholly unnoticed. Our entanglement interconnects us with other beings in the world at such a deep level that the phenomena remain largely hidden. If you were to bring it up with someone in polite company, they would likely give you a blank stare or maybe a confused “what are you talking about?”
The collective purpose of idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity is to provide the illusion of a “genuine ‘lively life'” without actually being challenged (173). Someone else has already made the hard decisions. And yet no one has decided anything. Heidegger says we are reassured by the illusion that others are in charge. We don’t have to worry about anything. This reassurance tranquilizes us and serves to increase our entanglement in the world of others. We lose ourselves in them. Their values become our values. We did not choose them.
Entanglement keeps us in a vicious circle with respect to our average everydayness. In rare moments we try to go back to our genuine understanding in order to find the self in its possibilities. But possibilities are never truly present, they are always in the future as a potential way of being. To press ahead we must first find ourselves in order to make choices. That takes effort. It’s much easier to pick up the “busyness” that the world offers. We find ourselves “surrendered to thrownness” [Geworfenheit] and thus “always already gone astray” such that we fail to recognize the self (144). Yet the self is a burden which calls us back to it when we go astray — more on that later. So, we go back to our understanding and again seek to revisit the self in its possibilities. Did you notice past and future tense here? This temporality will be the focus of the second division of the book.
Why do we bother to seek ourselves in our possibilities? In short, we are concerned. We care. We didn’t ask to be born but here we are, thrown into the world with no roadmap and no clue. Our thrownness is our being-in-the-world. And when we occasionally turn away from our entangled being-in-the-world, we disclose to ourselves the fact that we care about the choices we make and the person we become. This is the focus of an authentic self in the next section.
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