In everyday life, we constantly encounter and deal with useful things without pausing to inquire about the sources of their intelligibility. In Div. I of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes just such an inquiry. According to a common reading of Heidegger's analysis, the intelligibility of our everyday encounters and dealings with useful things is ultimately constituted by practical self-understandings. In this paper, I argue that while such practical self-understandings may be sufficient to constitute the intelligibility of the tools and equipment (...) specific to many practices, these “tools of the trade” are only a small portion of the things we encounter, use, and deal with on a daily basis. Practical self-understandings cannot similarly account for the intelligibility of the more mundane things—like toothbrushes and sidewalks—used in everyday life. I consider whether an anonymous self-understanding as “one,” “anyone,” or “no one in particular” —das Man—might play this intelligibility-constituting role. In examining this possibility, another type of self-understanding comes to light: cultural identities. I show that the cultural identities into which we are “thrown,” rather than practical identities or das Man, constitute the intelligibility of the abundance of mundane things that fill our everyday lives. Finally, I spell out how this finding bears on our understanding of Heidegger's notion of authenticity. (shrink)

This chapter provides an interpretation of the early Heidegger’s underdeveloped conception of the undistinguishedness of everyday human existence in Being and Time. After explaining why certain translation choices of some key terms in this text are interpretively and philosophically important, I first provide a concise argument for why the social constitution interpretation of the relation between ownedness and unownedness makes better overall sense of Heidegger’s ambivalent attitude toward the social constitution of the human being than the standard existentialist interpretation of (...) this relation. I then proceed to the heart of this chapter, which develops his inchoate conception of the undistinguishedness of everydayness by arguing that it specifies the third distinctive mode of concrete human existence in addition to ownedness and unownedness. Accordingly, I show how unownedness is actually a generic phenomenon with two distinct species, namely, undistinguishedness and disownedness, which are at once closely related to, but also differ in significant respects from, each other. Consequently, instead of taking for granted a one-dimensional and mutually exclusive opposition between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, I argue that we should adopt a two-dimensional and more nuanced understanding of the relations among undistinguishedness, disownedness, and ownedness that intersects with Heidegger’s underappreciated distinction between genuineness and ungenuineness. After raising and replying to some objections to this interpretation of undistinguishedness, I conclude this chapter by briefly sketching three of its philosophical consequences and pointing out its potential as an important resource for contemporary social theories. (shrink)

Sandra Lee Bartky criticises the account of meaning contained in Heidegger's ontology in Being and Time. In her view, Heidegger must choose between the claim that meaning is received and the claim that it is created, but is unable to do so. This paper argues that Bartky's criticism is misconceived, by showing that meaning, as Heidegger understands it, is necessarily both created and received. According to a number of influential commentators, the ultimate source of meaning is das Man – Heidegger's (...) conception of the social world. This paper initially considers, but ultimately rejects, the view that the source of meaning, as Heidegger presents it, is social. Instead, this paper argues that meaning is rooted in what Heidegger calls ‘letting be’. Letting be articulates a distinctive relationship between the human being (Dasein) and entities. This relationship, it is argued, accommodates the notion of meaning as both received and created, by reconstituting these terms within a context that defines the human being as an interpreting entity, therefore showing that letting be should be understood as the ultimate source of meaning in Heidegger's ontology. (shrink)

This essay critically engages Dreyfus's widely read interpretation of Heidegger's Being and Time . It argues that Dreyfus's reading is rooted in two primary claims or interpretative principles. The first - the Cartesianism thesis - indicates that Heidegger's objective in Being and Time is to overturn Cartesianism. The second - the hermeneutics of suspicion thesis - claims that Division II is supposed to suspect and throw into question the results of the Division I analysis. These theses contribute to the view (...) that there are two conflicting accounts of inauthenticity that threaten the coherence of Heidegger's notion of authenticity. This view concerning authenticity is mistaken, as are the two theses that support it. The first thesis is incorrect because Heidegger's explicit aim is to investigate the question of the meaning of being not to overturn Cartesianism. The second is incorrect because the analyses of Division I describe the structures of everyday human existence in preparation for a closer examination in Division II of what makes them possible. Division II does not undercut Division I; it carries the analysis deeper. Authenticity, then, is not a negation of everydayness; it is a deepening of the self-understanding expressed in everydayness. (shrink)

_Challenges conventional understandings of Heidegger’s account of the body._.

Heidegger's discussion of das Man (often translated as "the 'They'") in Being and Time is notoriously inconsistent, and raises a number of interpretative issues that have been debated in the secondary literature. This paper offers two arguments that aim to make for a consistent and charitable reading of das Man. First, unlike Dasein, das Man's way of being is not existence: das Man lacks Dasein's particularity (it offers only general norms, and cannot address Dasein's unique situation), unity (das Man is (...) not a unified set of norms, but rather an often inconsistent one) and distinctness (the boundary that fixes the concept of das Man is fuzzy). Second, this paper proposes that we read das Man as standing in contrast with Abständigkeit, or distantiality. Das Man is the socially constituted set of norms that we necessarily belong to, and distantiality is the equally inescapable difference that sets us apart from others. Together, they provide a framework within which Dasein is constituted by norms without inhibiting the possibility of authentic existence. (shrink)