Being and Time - The Everydayness of Living - Part 1

Heidegger’s Being and Time is obscure, hefty, clunky and just generally difficult to get through. At the same time it is wholly approachable as it’s moderately self-contained. One could argue that a rigorous understanding of Descartes is required but I’d posit that a general understanding of living in the 21st century, amassed by, well, living in the 21st century, is quite enough. Following the theme of unrigorousity, which, I think, is quite necessary, at least from the usual way we think of rigour in philosophy, with connections to logic, I will try to paint with broad brushstrokes the concept of The Everydayness of Living. In trying to illuminate this concept, I trust that the reader will try to suspend his disbelief and allow some things to be left unsaid; we must approach these concepts primarily as phenomena, not intellectually.

We will have to start by approximating Dasein. It can probably be fitted by the term Self, if such a thing is understood in its entirety. The “Self” is in that case made up by, for example, the Subject, whom we might follow Lacan in saying is born into, and exists entirely within, Language; the symbolic order. It is also constituted by sense-perception, but (rather crudely for the neccessity of briefness) understood in the phenomenological sense. We might shed some light on it by looking at Heidegger’s analysis of hearing and hearkening:

Hearkening is phenomenally still more primordial than what is defined “in the first instance” as “hearing” in psychology - the sensing of tones and the perception of sounds. … What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling. It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that … [Dasein] certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide the springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’.

We, Dasein, the “Self”, exists within the world, alongside it. It is not “out there”. This is, very fundamentally, how we must come to understand the primacy of phenomena and phenomenology as such. Phenomenologically the cogito is a misconstrued abstraction, the separation between mind and body simply does not exist. Our intelligence leapt before us and created a symbolical world which we’re stuck in. We might look at Baudrillard’s hyperreal defined in Simulacra and Simulation by a pretty analogy from Jorge Luis Borges On the Exactitude of Science:

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.

In Baudrillard’s rendition, it is conversely the map that people live in, the simulation of reality where the people of the Empire spend their lives ensuring their place in the representation is properly circumscribed and detailed by the map-makers; conversely, it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.

We should then understand Dasein in opposition to this fragmentation and abstraction. “Dasen certainly does not dwell proximally alongside sensations”, he does not have to create the world out of a swirling of sensations. He exists alongside it.

Dasein is defined, in his everydayness, primarily, by Others. We shall see how, precisely what this means, and what the consequences of this are. We must, at first, define how we see Others. They are constituted of Dasein, in indefinite form.

When, for example, we walk along the edge of a field but ‘outside it’, the field who’s itself as belonging to such-and-such a person, and decently kept up by him; the book we have used was bought at So-and-so’s shop and given by such-and-such a person, and so forth.

And although we might encounter definite Dasein like this in the world, the general relationship is to an indefinite Dasein. Generally, the field belongs to someone, and although that someone is definitely a definite someone, we do not know whom, and our relationship to that someone is to that of an abstract someone. This someone is indicative of Others: the abstract, general mass.

By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me - those over again whom the “I” stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself - those among whom one is too. … The world is always the one that I share with Others.

Others, which we shall refer to as they, could then rather be understood in terms of us. Doing so might proximally clarify the situation, but it will be misleading. They must precisely be they, even though it might constitute I, in order to signify the alien-ess of the mass. In order to be among Others, one must, and as we shall come to see one does, lose oneself, lose the “I”-ness of the I. It is necessarily always constituted of indefinite someones.

The Others are not definite Others. One belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their power. [They] are those who proximally and for the most part ‘are there’. The “who” is not this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all. The “who” is the neuter, the “they”, das Man.

The way we relate with and to Others make it easy to confuse them with Things, as objects present-at-hand. We easily fail to see them. This, in fact, existentially defines the relationship between Dasein and Others. Others are concealed for Dasein. The implication of this, as we shall expand on later, is of course that Dasein, when among Others, fail to see himself, loses himself. At this point we might like to inquire as to the causuality of things; does Dasein lose his Self because he is a part of Others, or does he become a part of Others because he loses his Self? Nonsense, we say. Causuality has nothing to do with our present undertaking.

Obviously, Others are not, existentially, Things. Others are encountered in their own Dasein, in their Being-with, dwelling alongside their world. This “Being-with” “is an existential characteristic of Dasein”. Furthermore, it is so “even when factically no Other is present-at-hand or perceived.” Being alone is simply a deficient mode of Being-with. It is not a negation of it. We know this to be true in the very definition of being alone. At the same time, “factical Being-alone is not obviated by the occurence of a second example of a human being beside me, or even ten such examples. Even if these and more are present-at-hand, Dasein can still be alone.” The explanation for this is that “their Dasein-with is encountered in a mode in which they are indifferent and alien.” Surrounding ourselves with people does not, existentially, make us less lonely.

Being among Others, then, is lonely. We might look, in order to concretize the whole thing, towards the street. When walking in the street, we must compose ourselves with indifference. At least, we tend to.

Being for, against, or without one another, passing one another by, not “mattering” to one another - these are possible ways of solicitude. And it is precisely these last-named deficient and Indifferent modes that characterize everyday, average Being-with-one-another.

We might try to adapt a more caring, technically solicitous, attitude toward Others, which would really negate Others by giving them definiteness. And depending on one’s circumstances might succeed in various degrees, at least for a while. In the end it will be quite overwhelming. It certainly becomes overwhelming simply abstractely relating to this act; imagine everyone you meet in the street as definite someones, actual people, with their own life stories. One can, however, try a lesser version of the act. Try buying a bouquet of flowers and give to someone on the street, a stranger. It is, if you will allow the phrase, a magical act. It is, if done solicitously, an act of creation, of seeing someone, deshrouding the indefiniteness and letting someone step through. However, in its magical property the primary effect is the illumination of difference; this is not how we live in everydayness.

How do we live, then? Primarily, as you might admit, absorbed, in life, to be more precise, with the world, fascinated.

When Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern - that is, at the same time, in its Being-with towards Others - it is not itself. Who is it, then, who has taken over Being as everyday Being-with-one-another?

We will have to unwind the story a bit in order to grasp the larger implications. What we have seen is that the “subject character of one’s own Dasein and that of Others is to be defined existentially - that is, in terms of certain ways in which one may be”. In other words, being among Others is an existential category. Likewise, living in everydayness, absorbed into the world, we concluded that the world strikes us as made up of Things, present-at-hand. So we continue, we thus encounter Others environmentally “as what they are; they are what they do.”

We, too, when absorbed in the world, see ourselves merely as present-at-hand, among Others. There is then

constant care as to the way one differs from [Others], whether that difference is merely one that is to be evened out, whether one’s own Dasein has lagged behind the Others and wants to catch up in relation to them, or whether one’s Dasein already has some priority over them and sets out to keep them suppressed.

The care about this distance between them is disturbing to Being-with-one-another, though this disturbance is one that is hidden from it. If we may express this existentially, such Being-with-one-another has the character of distantiality. The more inconspicuous this kind of Being is to everyday Dasein itself, all the more stubbornly and primordially does it work itself out. But this distantiality which belongs to Being-with, is such that Dasein, as everyday Being-with-one-another, stands in subjection to Others. It itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others.

When we are among Others we necessarily define ourselves in relation to them; this is an existential property of Others. Dasein is ontologically disturbed by Others. Which is to say, we, as everyday Dasein, orient ourselves, in our very being towards Others, specifically, towards our difference to them. I, in my everydayness, as such, does not exist. Not as me, rather. My Being is primarily defined by the Others, by my relation to them. So we find ourselves, in our measurements, lost in their world, subjected to them.

We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The “they”, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.

We might take this opportunity to once again concretize a bit. Do we not recognize this in ourselves? The measurement is the nefarious trap into everydayness. We care. Precisely by our complaints, by our persistent attempts at individuation, by our attempts to ‘shrink back from the great mass’, we take part. And who among us can truthfully claim to be apart? Our individuation is the proof, instead of being in definite form, we try to make others admit, to make them see us as Dasein. A desperate attempt, perhaps, to find ourselves again, by ignorantly using someone else. If only he can see me, then I must exist! Alas, it is not only to ourselves we are concealed. We might remember; we encounter Others as what they do.

In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, ever Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” is unfolded.

In its indefiniteness, nothing, of course, definite, is. Everything is cloudy, hazy, and exceptionally blunt. It is, in short, average. In averageness, possibility is stripped away. Among Others, there is nothing exceptional. There is no genuineness, as everything is simply present-at-hand, Things. As such, there is availability; “By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered off gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone.” Because it is accessible, and “because it is insensitive to every difference of level and of genuineness”, publicness “proximally controls every way in which the world gets interpreted”. Furthermore, “it is always right” as it “never gets to the heart of the matter.”

Every secret loses its force.

Because the “they” presents every judgement and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability. The “they” can, as it were, manage to have “them” constantly invoking it. .. It was always the “they” who did it, and yet it can be said that it has been “no one”.

At the same time, it disburdens individuals from accountability. Being is obscured, individuality disappears in the mass.

Thus the particular Dasein in its everydayness is disburdened by the “they”.

They accomodate Dasein, if he submits to the flow of things.

And because the “they” constantly accommodates the particular Dasein by disburdening it of its Being, the “they” retains and enhances its stubborn dominion. Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they … is the nobody to whom every Dasein has already surrendered itself in Being-among-one-another.

In these modes one’s way of Being is that of inauthenticity and failure to stand by one’s Self. To be in this way signifies no lessening of Dasein’s facticity, just as the “they”, as the “nobody”, is by no means nothing at all.

The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self - that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the “they”, and must first find itself. This dispersal characterizes the “subject” of that kind of Being which we know as concernful absorption in the world we encounter as closest to us.

Where do we go when we forget ourselves, absorbed into the world? Who do we become? The answer, our they-self, we are dispersed into the Other, and we must find ourselves again. This is our Being of everydayness.

Proximally, it is not “I”, in the sense of my own Self, that “am”, but rather the Others, whose way is that of the “they”. In terms of the “they”, and as the “they”, I am “given” proximally to “myself”. Proximally Dasein is “they”, and for the most part it remains so. If Dasein discovers the world in its own way and brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery of the “world” and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way.

We must remember, that this everyday way of being is defined by its absorption in the world, its forgetting of itself. As it is absorbed in the world, “the world itself gets passed over … its place gets taken by what is present-at-hand within-the-world, namely, Things”.

This very state of Being, in its everyday kind of Being, is what proximally misses itself and covers itself up.