This chapter compares Heidegger’s transcendental approach to social ontology with that found in Husserl. I argue that Husserl and Heidegger are united by the idea that ’the world’ or ’transcendence’ constitutes the most basic form of intersubjectivity, but that their different understandings of the concept of the world lead to divergent conceptions of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In short, Husserl takes the world to involve irreducible references to others since perceptual objects can only appear as real or as transcendent if we assume that they possess an inexhaustive number of unperceived aspects that are, in principle, available to other (transcendental) subjects. Heidegger, on the contrary, rejects both Husserl’s interest in objectivity and his notion of the transcendental subject. Instead, he claims that Dasein’s relation to the world must be understood in terms of practical and affective engagement within a field of possibilities, that is, in terms of existential projections. Accordingly, the most basic form of intersubjectivity is found in the transcendental necessity that the same field of entities can be subjected to a multitude of existential projections.

I conclude by summarising the direct and indirect arguments offered in support of Heidegger’s claims that human mindedness and agency are intrinsically embedded within a shared world and that the shared world constitutes the most basic form of intersubjectivity.

In contrast to the small-scale we of shared action, this chapter analyses the large-scale and temporally prolonged we’s of communities governed by social norms. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of the Anyone and of historicity, I distinguish between anonymous social normativity and historical social normativity. Anonymous social normativity provides a set of social norms in the form of a relatively stable, socially inflected comportmental pattern that we assume to be a universal default. However, this kind of social normativity comes with only a minimal awareness of its own nature, extent, and origin. Historical social normativity, on the other hand, implies a historical awareness in which social norms are disclosed as historical and hence as fragile and contestable. For Heidegger, this leads to the proto-political possibility of what I call communal commitments—roughly, commitments in which a group of people commit themselves to sustain a particular set of social norms across generations.

This chapter turns from the you of interpersonal understanding to the we of shared action. Drawing on Heidegger’s philosophy of action (as well as that of Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus), I argue that we should conceptualise shared action on the basis of pre-reflective solicitations rather than deliberate acts guided by occurrent and propositionally structured intentions. In dialogue with Bratman, Gilbert, Schmid, and Zahavi, I show that Heidegger’s conception of existential selfhood – that is, the sense of self reflected back to us from worldly solicitations and saliences – enables us to account for several distinct types of shared action, depending on how the solicitation in question refers to a group of agents rather than a single agent. I further show that Heidegger’s notion of discourse [Rede] refers to the expressive (but not necessarily linguistic) and often unconscious process in which saliences are shared between people.

This chapter outlines and discusses different approaches to social ontology and locates Heidegger within a range of contemporary debates. I first discuss various accounts of the scope and method of social ontology by suggesting that social ontology has a restricted scope if it takes the social world to be a distinct domain among others and that, in contrast, has an unrestricted scope if it takes sociality to be an irreducible dimension of what there is. Discussing his general conception of fundamental ontology as well as the development of his early work, I then show that Heidegger’s social ontology is non-reductive and has an unrestricted scope. I then qualify this claim by arguing that Heidegger’s social ontological method can rightly be called transcendental in the sense that he argues that the irreducible social dimension of what there is depends not on empirical social formations but on transcendental relations to others.

The introduction presents some general reflections on what characterises Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and what makes his thought a particularly promising point of departure for doing social ontology. I first introduce Heidegger’s holistic conceptions of Dasein and being-in-the-world by way of contrast to Cartesian atomism. I then go on to show that Heidegger conceives of intersubjectivity as a triangular relation between self, world, and other rather than a dyadic relation between two independent subjects. My claim is that Heidegger’s social ontology is found directly in his conception of the shared world and that his more well-known accounts of the Anyone and solicitude should be understood within this general framework. I also reflect on the relation between Heidegger’s social ontology and his politics and provide an outline of the book.

This chapter discusses whether Heidegger’s holism – roughly, the view that the meaning of the parts (entities) depends on the whole (the world) – entails a vicious relativism. I argue that Heidegger is a holist because he is committed to both object externalism (the view that intentional states depend on environmental objects) and social externalism (the view that intentional states depend on other people). Whether his holism entails relativism depends on how we understand these two commitments. Discussing recent interpretations of Heidegger’s holism (Lafont, Dreyfus, Okrent, Carman), I argue that Heidegger’s holism entails a form of relativism only if we take his social externalism to be a function of social conventions. I then go on to challenge that this is the case by arguing that Heidegger is an open-ended social externalist according to whom intentional states do not depend solely on our relation to social conventions (or any other particular social formation such as language or tradition) but on our on-going social interaction broadly construed.

In this chapter, I clarify, contextualise, and reassess Heidegger’s ambiguous and polemical account of social cognition. Although commentators often take his critique of, for instance, empathy to be pretty straightforward, a closer look reveals that Heidegger makes a number of seemingly incoherent claims. To clarify this, I identify six different objections raised by Heidegger against theories of social cognition and then reassess who (among both historical and contemporary contenders) are, in fact, vulnerable to these objections. Drawing on Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, I then go on to develop a positive, Heideggerian account of social cognition. I show that Heidegger’s view has much in common with phenomenological empathy theories but that he departs from these by arguing that we must understand the other as exhibiting a practical comportment that constitutively depends on our shared environment. Finally, I consider how our understanding of our fellow Dasein differs from our understanding of nonhuman animals.

This chapter discusses Heidegger’s concept of authenticity and the extent to which it entails an individualism incompatible with his social ontological holism. I argue that Heidegger’s notion of authenticity does not refer to a process of individualisation in which individuals come to rely mostly or solely on their own abilities. Rather, it amounts to what I call an emphatic individuation in which Dasein ontically comes to understand its own nature. Rather than prescribing a set of beliefs or actions, I argue that authenticity requires Dasein to adopt a set of ontologically transparent second-order attitudes on its own existence. This solves two problems inherent to Heidegger’s conception of the self, namely, its lack of constancy (the capacity of the self to remain itself in changing situations) and autonomy (the capacity to commit to some possibilities rather than others). These problems are solved by the analysis of being-towards-death and conscience, respectively. I then consider what the demand for authenticity entails for Heidegger’s conception of face-to-face relations and his conception of historical communities and how it differs from moral obligations.

By analysing material from and slightly after Heidegger’s brief time as rector of Freiburg University, I show that he conceives of the state and the educational system as means to sustaining a communal commitment to a philosophically inflected nationalism. Although it relies on a distinctly Heideggerian conception of the state, Heidegger’s nationalism is by most measures rather trivial. He does, however, try to philosophically justify his nationalism and antisemitism by recourse to what has become known as the history of being. I show that this period of Heidegger’s thought is marred by several assumptions and inferences that contradict his earlier and much more convincing social ontology. I thus find myself in a position to criticise Heidegger’s politics from within. More specifically, I criticise Heidegger for inconsistently attributing an exceptional type of world-disclosure to the Führer; for confusing ontic and ontological senses of community and the shared world; and, finally, for giving methodological priority to a radical form historicism over and above transcendentalism.