Abstract

In Being and Time, Division One, Chapter 4, Heidegger develops the structures “Being-with and Dasein-with [Mitsein and Mitdasein]” and “what we might call the ‘subject’ of everydayness—the ‘they’”. In the last section of the chapter, Section 27, Heidegger presents six characters of the ‘they’, namely, “distantiality, averageness, levelling down, publicness, the disburdening of one’s Being, and accomodation”. The meaning of the last five characters is relatively unproblematic. For instance, by “averageness” Heidegger obviously wants to indicate that the ‘they’ establishes a set of behavioural patterns as normal and ‘natural’. For example, at certain junctures of their lives, individual Daseine have to choose, or are able to choose, among several options within a given set of options. However, the entire set of options as such has already been adopted by them in a self-evident way and without much thought. The ‘they’ forces this choice by suppressing other possibilities and other ways of handling given possibilities. Thus, the respective averageness results from a screening process in which the ‘they’ constantly rules out other possibilities or prevents them from emerging in the first place. Heidegger calls this “the ‘levelling down’ [Einebnung] of all possibilities of Being”. However, the first character, distantiality, seems more difficult to understand. In the English translation, Heidegger characterizes it thus