The confusion surrounding Heidegger's account of death in Being and Time has led to severe criticisms, some of which dismiss his analysis as incoherent and obtuse. I argue that Heidegger's critics err by equating Heidegger's concept of death with our ordinary concept. As I show, Heidegger's concept of death is not the same as the ordinary meaning of the term, namely, the event that ends life. But nor does this concept merely denote the finitude of Dasein's possibilities or the groundlessness (...) of existence, as William Blattner and Hubert Dreyfus have suggested. Rather, I argue, the concept of death has to be understood both as temporal finitude and as finitude of possibility. I show how this reading addresses the criticisms directed at Heidegger's death analysis as well as solving textual problems generated by more limited interpretations of the concept. (shrink)

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)

Current interpretations of Heidegger's notion of das Man are caught in a dilemma: either they cannot accommodate the ontological status Heidegger accords it or they cannot explain his negative evaluation of it, in which it is treated as ontic. This paper uses Simmel's agonistic account of human sociality to integrate the ontological and the ontic, indeed perjorative aspects of Heidegger's account. Section I introduces the general problem, breaks the exclusive link of Heidegger's account to Kierkegaard and delineates the general form (...) of a solution. Section II then sketches Simmel's conception of sociology and sociality. Section III determines what Heidegger is trying to do in Chapter Four of Division I in Being and Time in order to formulate a strictly ontological account of das Man. Section IV uses Simmel's account of sociality to build into this ontological account an inherent tendency to display the negative features Heidegger ascribes to das Man. In conclusion, section V points to how the proposed account of das Man intimates the character of fundamental ontology as nascently a form of critical theory. It also explains the extent to which Heidegger's perjorative characterisations of das Man and the Man-selbst are legitimate. (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)