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So where are we thus far? Heidegger has said that my essence lies in my existence – that is, who I am is determined by the actions I take given the possibilities that lie before me. I’m surrounded by people, hammers, doors, and thousands of other innerworldly beings in the world. My world is a holistic context of purposes and meanings that shapes me as much as I shape it.
This has all been a way of saying that by being-in the world we are also being-with [Mitsein] other innerworldly beings. We are invested deeply (or absorbed) in our surrounding world: careers, families, sports, projects, tasks, hobbies, amusements, and a thousand other things that keep us busy or distracted. As a result, Heidegger believes we have a tendency to live away from ourselves and get caught up in the world:
“The nearest and elemental way of Dasein encountering the world goes so far that even one’s own Dasein initially becomes ‘discoverable’ by looking away from its ‘experiences’ and the ‘center of its actions,’ or by not yet ‘seeing’ them at all. Dasein initially finds ‘itself’ in what it does, needs, expects, has charge of, in the things at hand which it initially takes care of in the surrounding world” (119).
In other words, we identify with a self formed only in relation to the things we do in the surrounding world. We are so absorbed in the world, our “being there,” that the only way we can discover (or know) our existence is by setting aside or pausing the myriad tasks and projects we undertake in the world. A good example of this “setting aside” is the role that meditation plays in Buddhism.
Heidegger thinks it is rare that we “come up for air,” so to speak, and look away from our average public self. This is what he’s getting at in section 27 when he drops this bomb:
“Dasein stands in subservience to others. It itself is not; the others have taken its being away from it. The everyday possibilities of being of Dasein are at the disposal of the whims of others. These others are not definite others. On the contrary, any other can represent them. What is decisive is only the inconspicuous domination by others that Dasein as being-with has already taken over unawares. One belongs to the others oneself, and entrenches their power. ‘The others,’ whom one designates as such in order to cover over one’s own essential belonging to them, are those who are there initially and for the most part in everyday being-with-one-another. The who is not this one and not that one, not oneself, not some, and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the they [das Man]” (126).
“The they” is an unfortunate translation of das Man. But honestly, from what I’ve read in the secondary literature there is no good way to express Heidegger’s use of das Man into English, so I’ll pick “the others” or just “others” because it works better for me than the awkward “the they.”
Who are the others? Everyone and no one. They are the surrounding culture, the crowd, peer pressure, norms, traditions, spoken and unspoken expectations, or as Heidegger says, “the public ‘surrounding world'” (126). Heidegger asserts that we feel overwhelmed by the pressure of choosing our being. An easy way out is to pick up the norms that the others offer as a template for living. For example, every woman has been told, implicitly or explicitly, that she should have children in her twenties because that’s just what one does. Or a man is told to hide his emotions because that is what is expected of him. Who is doing the telling here? Maybe a parent. More likely, it’s just something in the air. Of course, Heidegger is not saying people shouldn’t be parents in their twenties. What he’s saying is that it should be an authentic decision. When we succumb to possible ways of being that are not of our own choosing, this veils our own authentic being and leads to another way of being that is inauthentic:
“This being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of being of ‘the others’ in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the ‘great mass’ the way they withdraw, we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness” (127).
Heidegger calls this state of being, in which we are dissolved into their world, the “they-self.” Here we lose ourselves and take on values and ways of being that are inauthentic because we did not choose them. This “losing ourselves” is what Heidegger calls fallenness or entanglement [Verfallen]. I’ll go deeper into that in the next post.
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