2.1 From Empathy to Being-with

At least as early as Descartes, whose methodical skepticism establishes a radical distinction between mind and body, there has been concern over the possibility of knowing either that other persons exist or that one can justifiably ascribe minds to other individuals whom I experience. To quote Descartes, when I see other human beings on the street, “do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons?”Footnote ⁴ In the phenomenological tradition, much has been debated about the origin and the constitution of the sense of another person within one’s experience – an alter ego – over against one’s own immediate sense of being a person – an ego. Due to the focus of this Element, we cannot delve into the intricacies of the debate. For our purposes, it suffices to note that a key strand of phenomenological thought asserts that empathy (Einfühlung) serves as a privileged and fundamental mode of perceiving others, different in character than the ordinary perception of lifeless objects as well as animals. In this context, the term empathy does not necessarily refer to related psychological phenomena such as sympathy, emotional contagion, or identifying with others. Instead, it denotes the prior cognitive capacity to perceive other human beings as living subjects rather than as mechanical objects.Footnote ⁵ Central representatives of this theory of empathy are Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein,Footnote ⁶ who were thinking in response to an earlier psychological theory of empathy put forth by Theodor Lipps.Footnote ⁷ Phenomenological theories of empathy attempt to explain the possibility of perceiving others as embodied persons who are fully conscious and intentional, despite the fact that the evidence for the phenomenon of a stream of consciousness other than our own is apparently lacking, since the only first-person perspective we have access to is our own. Though phenomenological thought in general doubts the Cartesian dualistic distinction between mind and body, in Heidegger’s eyes such approaches nevertheless still take an isolated or pregiven subject as their starting point of inquiry: “first I am alone in the world, or first only the ‘I’ is given without the world” (Reference Jaeger and KisielGA20: 327). According to Heidegger, such theories proceed to establish and validate the perception and knowledge of others based on the erroneous assumption, either tacit or explicit, that our inquiry necessarily begins with an independent self whose ties to the world do not determine what it is ontologically in any essential way.Footnote ⁸

This “bad” conception of subjectivity (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 114), a self-encapsulated Cartesian mind, leads one to assert that empathy provides “the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject, which is given proximally as alone, to the other subject, which is proximally quite closed off” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 124). When we assume that the self is a thing in itself that exists independently of and prior to other beings in the world, then naturally arises the task of describing and explaining how we acquire knowledge of the outer world. The distinction between inner and outer experience gains ontological weight. Other subjects, however, seem to pose a peculiar kind of problem. Not only do general epistemological problems apply to our attempt to know them, but the supposedly private and first-person character of experience also seems to make doubtful, or even deny, the possibility of knowing other subjects not as objects, but precisely as individuals who possess their own subjectivity. To know that others are there as living minded persons, must I not be capable of experiencing something of their own lived experience? For Heidegger, however, not only is there no real problem of knowing an “outer” world, but the problem of other minds is, in effect, a pseudo-problem. “The question concerning whether we human beings can transpose ourselves into other human beings does not ask anything, because it is not a possible question in the first place. It is a meaningless, indeed a nonsensical question because it is fundamentally redundant” (Reference von Herrmann, McNeill and WalkerGA29/30: 301). Such questions and difficulties are only apparent, parasitic on an unjustified assumption of a radical distinction between subject and world, and between different minds. For those who recognize this distinction, empathy is of central epistemological and ontological significance, as a means of giving evidence for the existence of others. But again, for Heidegger empathy is not so much of an epistemological or ontological problem, but mainly a phenomenon deserving psychological inquiry that “gets its motivation from the unsociability of the dominant modes of Being-with” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 125). It is a phenomenon that arises after processes of estrangement and alienation occur and become entrenched to such a degree that we no longer regard our social relationality as prior in our experience of the world. Though Heidegger does mention a “special hermeneutics of empathy” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 125), it concerns how a primordial sense of being-with gets obscured and revealed again. Put differently, for Heidegger, empathy does not refer to our basic capability of knowing that before us stand other living human beings as such. It emerges when we become unaware of the original social relationality that makes us who we are. Empathy is therefore secondary when we concentrate on the basic sense of sociality as a condition of Dasein.

As mentioned, Dasein is in the world in the sense of being engaged and absorbed in a dynamic movement of concerns, aspirations, cares, and ends; and it is with others, that is, it exists in relation to others who are similarly invested in the same world. Such relation is prior to any actual interaction with and knowledge of other persons. In Heidegger’s words, it is the “formal condition of possibility of the co-disclosure of the Dasein of others for the Dasein which is in each instance one’s own. This character of being-with defines the Dasein even when another Dasein is in fact not being addressed and cannot be perceived as on hand” (Reference Jaeger and KisielGA20: 328). The self is structured as being with others, before any actual interaction with and knowledge of other beings. By “formal condition,” Heidegger means an invariant structural characteristic that is constantly operative as a necessary requirement for something to be possible or intelligible for Dasein in the first place. On this ground, empathy is not a transcendental event of constitution, but rather merely the concrete playing out of a possibility. As Heidegger says: “‘Empathy’ does not first constitute Being-with; only on the basis of Being-with does ‘empathy’ become possible…” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 125). The possibility of empathy – discerning the other’s own circumstances and possibilities of being-in-the-world – presupposes that we already share the world with others. “Feeling our way into” the lives of others can occur only on the prior ground of a familiarity with the world as public and shared, and this is why alienation and private experiences are secondary phenomena.Footnote ⁹ Not only is empathy not a primordial phenomenon, then, but according to Heidegger, our focus on it prevents us from recognizing the originally communal nature of subjectivity. As he says in a series of lectures from 1928–29, Einleitung in die Philosophie:Footnote ¹⁰ “But insofar as one generally tags being-with-one-another (Miteinander) with the label of ‘empathy,’ the […] decisive insight is not gained, that being-with-one-another belongs to the being of Dasein as such, and indeed, that Dasein as such is also already being-with” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 141).

To better explain what he means by being-with or being-with-one-another, in these 1928–29 lectures Heidegger sets out on a phenomenological exploration of a shared experience of hiking. Let us envision with Heidegger two hikers traversing a mountain pass, navigating their way past two boulders on a scree slope. This pastoral and seemingly insignificant event offers the opportunity of comparing two different notions of togetherness: a multiplicity of objects contra a multiplicity of Dasein. The first case represents a mere collection of inanimate objects, whereas the second exemplifies an intertwinement of subjectivity, life, and experience. As Heidegger describes this difference, we can say that the two boulders are present-at-hand together, but not that they are present-at-hand with one another. Conversely, when we say that the two hikers are with one another, we mean that they possess a unique relation that one cannot observe in the case of a mere multiplicity of occurrent objects. What constitutes this difference? If we were to take an approach oriented toward the explanatory role of empathy, one might say that, though the hikers are present-at-hand together like the boulders, a mutual conscious awareness of each other accompanies their togetherness, such that “the one grasps the other” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 86). This is a common, though simplified, way of giving an account of what happens in acts of empathy qua recognition of others as persons. Heidegger immediately rejects this kind of explanation, saying that it posits being-with-one-another merely as a conscious form of being-present-at-hand-together, thus overlooking the unique nature of the phenomenon of being with each other. This approach strips Dasein of its peculiar way of being as being-in-the-world, by neglecting a more fundamental sense of shared human life. The phenomenon of empathy lacks ontological priority in the sense that it is parasitic upon a prior state of being with others.Footnote ¹¹ Mutual consciousness of each other already assumes that I and other are together, and it is precisely this prior form of togetherness that demands explanation.

Heidegger provides another reason to dismiss mutual awareness as a defining feature of being-with, citing shared experiences where mutual attention appears to be absent. Continuing the example of the two hikers, Heidegger invites us to imagine them going round a bend in the path, suddenly discovering an unexpected view of the mountain range. Captivated by the scenery, they stand still beside each other, fully absorbed in the experience of the mountains. In this state, claims Heidegger, one does not find any trace of active mutual grasping of one another, since both viewers are stunned by the sight and in a certain sense absorbed by it. Heidegger points to an experience shared without words or mutual explicit awareness: “Are the two of them now merely next to one another like the two boulders, or are they in this moment precisely with one another in a way that they cannot be if they tirelessly chatter away together or even mutually apprehend one another and size up each other’s complexes?” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 86). The key insight is that there are situations where people are together in practice, yet not actively aware of each other in a conscious act of recognition, for they are both intentionally directed toward something or someone else. This joint comportment toward a common experience implies a togetherness that transcends explicit mutual recognition. Since we cannot rule out such situations as examples of shared events, reciprocal awareness cannot serve as a general criterion for defining what it means to be with others as such. As we examine further in more detail, mutual awareness or empathy are not the fundamental forms of being-with, since they rest on a prior ground of shared participation in a common state of affairs, which in turn presupposes a common sphere of open manifestness.

Evidently, then, for Heidegger, empathy as a philosophical problem of the first order derives from a misconception of what subjectivity essentially is. By neglecting the fact that we are already in a world with others, we create the problem of knowing and sharing the world with others. The otherness that is disclosed in the phenomenon of empathy, that is, the alterity which others may represent,Footnote ¹² is for Heidegger a derivative phenomenon. And this is not because the “I” is originally a solitary self-identical Cartesian ego, but because the togetherness at the heart of the meaning of “being-with” is originally an intimate unity, though in a unique sense that we will soon unravel. Only against this background of original communality do the phenomena of estrangement and otherness make sense. Empathy is, therefore, no more than an attempt to bring to the surface and thematize a fundamental togetherness that is already a constitutive condition of Dasein’s being. As Heidegger notes, this togetherness is so self-evident, that it “creates the illusion that in this being alongside one another there is initially a gap which needs to be bridged, as though human beings were not transposed into one another at all here, as though one human being would first have to empathize their way into the other in order to reach them” (Reference von Herrmann, McNeill and WalkerGA29/30: 302). Our being with others is such a fundamental aspect of our existence as Dasein that we often overlook it, as many have done in the past.

2.2 The Shared Sphere of Manifestness

In what sense is Dasein inherently communal? How does sociality manifest itself as a formal condition whose fundamental sense is unity rather than alterity? It is crucial to highlight that for Heidegger we should not understand the “unity” of the with-relations between different entities who are Dasein, the “being-with-one-another,” which is an essential characteristic of being Dasein, in terms of “a summative result of the occurrence of several ‘subjects’” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 125). Being-with, as an existential condition and possibility, does not imply being a component of a multiplicity in the way a unit is part of a sum. Such a grasp of the unity of being-with abstracts from the whole context of being-in-the-world, formalizing a given collection of persons strictly in terms of their number. Being-with is precisely not a given collection of people, rather a condition and dimension of experience as such. Others are not “everyone else but me – those over against 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” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 118). While Dasein is inherently social, it should not be understood as one discrete individual among many others, nor as simply a member of a collective or group.

The fundamentally social being of Dasein at base consists in a common sphere of manifestness, a shared space in which things reveal themselves through various engagements in the world, some practically and actually shared, while some personal and private. All these actual and possible ways of being human assume from the outset a shared world. To better understand the primordial “unity” of being-with, one should clarify the sense in which Dasein’s world is a shared one. The basic condition for any form of sharing – whether it involves a tool, a room, a car, an apartment, moments in time, a theory, parents, or love – is that the object of sharing is already available to all parties involved. That is, the object (in the broadest sense of the word) must be there for everyone to regard in some way, even if it turns out that different people share the same thing but comport themselves toward and with it in different ways. A simple example could be a hammer. For many it is a tool for building and crafting things, while others, such as artists, put this hammer in a different context of artistic creation, and yet others from a different culture might understand and use hammers in the context of ritual. Such an object, though perhaps put to use in various ways, is still shared in the minimal sense of common availability. That is, the object must be available, must be there and manifest, for it to take on significance in any given context. This is not to say, however, that it is there in raw presence, as present-at-hand, before it gets clothed with practical significance, nor does it imply that availability qua readiness-to-hand is the absolute primordial way beings appear to us. Rather, one must presuppose a shared original manifestness as a formal condition of possibility for the unfolding of significance in all its possible senses.Footnote ¹³

In his Einleitung lectures, Heidegger discusses this condition of primordial manifestness in terms of sociality as a shared space of truth, that is, a common sphere that enables things to reveal themselves, a space of “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit).Footnote ¹⁴ And so, as Knudsen puts it: “Unconcealment makes entities available to a plurality of different usages” (Reference Knudsen2022: 84). The key term in this context is being manifest (offenbar sein (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 88)), which implies that being-with others is being in a sphere of open manifestation. A significant characteristic of this sphere is that it is the same for every Dasein. But what constitutes this sameness? Let us return to Heidegger’s pastoral example of the hikers. Let’s imagine, he says, that the hikers have come back from their tour in the forest to their cabin. One chops wood, while the other peels potatoes (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 91–92). Though each of them attends to something specifically different than the other, it is still obvious that the two are together as with-one-another, and not only because they are both in the same hut in close spatial proximity to each other. They are genuinely together because they both have the same intention (Absicht) toward a common concern, which is the preparation of dinner, and more in general of providing for their stay in the hut. One finds their being-with-one-another in their tending to the same (“…in Absicht auf selbiges…” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 92)), even though they are comported toward different objects. The primary meaning of “the same” in this context is not that of one and the same object of comportment, but rather the sharing of a common end through which both activities make sense. In this case, there is a sharing of a joint end that constitutes a shared horizon of intelligibility. The sphere of manifestness of the hut with its objects and activities is inseparable from this common end that provides reasons for any actual or possible occupation.

We should notice that in contrast to those who share a hut in the mountains, those who share a world don’t necessarily share common ends. Being-with as a general characteristic and condition of experience

The sense of the world as a totality of concerns always points to others as a possibility, whether they are actually related to us or not. But nevertheless, Heidegger’s example brings us closer to pinning down the fundamental sense of “the same” as a ground of shared intelligibility. This ground is operative even when apparently difference reigns supreme: “Someone in Berlin sees an automobile, and a farmer in the Black Forest sees his cow; there is more than one who apprehends something identical, and yet not something the same in being with one another, and yet, even here, there is still a with-one-another” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 97). Two different people can be in different locations, engaged in different activities, with quite different social backgrounds, and yet still share a sphere of common intelligibility.

As mentioned, there are many things one can share with others, and different senses in which sharing occurs. One can share an object by dividing it into pieces, or by possessing it in different moments in time. Different people can share a space, an origin, or a communal identity. Yet another form of sharing takes the form of sharing an experience, for example, sharing the view of a beautiful sunset. But in all these senses, Heidegger argues, there is an underlying presupposition that what we share is, in some sense, at our disposal. Otherwise, sharing it would not make sense as possessing or participating in something together. However, even this basic common availability presupposes a yet more fundamental layer of experience. Before any appropriation of something can occur, it must already be present in what Heidegger calls “original sharing” (ursprüngliche Sichteilen), which is prior to any type of possession (Besitz) (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 100–101). To be able to divide something, to use something together or at different times, to share an experience, an identity, a sentiment, or a thought, we must first have it in common in a more fundamental sense. We must share it beforehand, in such a way that it stands before us as already common to us, prior to any comportment. This form of prior sharing prevails before we take possession of something as already situated in a network of significant ends. Taking the piece of chalk in the classroom as an example, Heidegger says:

Before writing with the chalk on a blackboard, or even before the communication of any statement about the piece of chalk, we share the unfolding of its being together in a primordial way: “We let things be as they are, leave them to themselves, even and precisely when we are preoccupied with them, no matter how intensively” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 102). Such sharing has a twofold sense. First, before any regard, actualization, or modification on our part, we share the way beings unfold to us simply in letting them be as they always originally are for us. We let the chalk be – leave it – as it is without any further secondary modification. But at the same time, we must not forget that beings are for us in the sense that their intelligibility depends on their relation to us. The chalk is there for us, that is, present in relation to us as something available, for example, for writing on a board. We thus let it be also by enabling it to be what it is. Intelligible being is necessarily relational and cannot be understood outside of this relation to us who understand. The sense of “letting be” in this context, then, consists not only in acquiescing or allowing things to be what they are, but also to an enabling, making possible for things to be as they are.Footnote ¹⁵ Beings are related to us, and have meaning and function only in virtue of our letting them be in this double sense: opening up a space for their appearance and interpreting them as what they are as part of a complex nexus of signification. Both aspects are crucial for establishing the meaning of original sharing as both receptive and constituting.

Metaphorically speaking, Dasein is a sphere that lights up and shines upon things to reveal them as they are for us in this twofold sense of “letting.”Footnote ¹⁶ This light is not coincidental or contingent, but an existential moment of Dasein; it is the human being’s true lumen naturale: “To say that it is ‘illuminated’ (erleuchtet) means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared (gelichtet) in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing (Lichtung)” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 133). In this context Heidegger characterizes the basic relation of Dasein to things, letting-be (Seinlassen), as indifference (Gleichgültigkeit), since it precedes any of our potential and actual concerns, prior to any form of interestedness or disinterestedness.Footnote ¹⁷ One does not need to actively attend to something to be with it, but rather what is essential is an indifferent and even involuntary (un)comportment to things which constitutes their being, by letting them be. And it is key to emphasize that this letting be is essentially shared. The “clearing” which is Dasein is shared and common, that is, the structure of the “clearing” of Dasein is that of sharing and commonality. Before any particular comportment toward a thing, we must share it in a primordial manner; and “this common thing makes possible being-with-one-another” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 103). This sharing of something as it is, a sharing of a primordial relation to something, points to the relation of truth as unconcealment. Though his theory of truth is far beyond the scope of this Element, it is still important to note that Heidegger defines being-with-one-another in its most primordial sense as a sharing in truth (Sichteilen in Wahrheit): “Being-with-one-another is a sharing in truth” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 107). Commonality, then, is grounded in an unconcealment which we essentially share. And such sharing as “letting” being unfold is neither strictly passive nor active, but rather a middle common ground comprising both aspects.Footnote ¹⁸

2.3 Sharing in Truth

We saw earlier that to be with others means to have something in common in all our different comportments. In Heidegger’s example, as evening is drawing near, the two weary hikers come back to their hut. Though they perform different tasks, being comported toward different objects, they are nevertheless together, and this is not due to their common spatial location. We said that what unites them is their comportment toward a common concern. Now we can say that since every concern presupposes “indifference,” in the form of a letting-be of things, we ought to seek the ground of togetherness in a common unconcealment. However, the root of such togetherness is not found in any particular object, end, or concern. It lies, rather, in unconcealment as such – a common sphere of unconcealment. Together, the hikers take part in this sphere, a common space in which things are encountered.

In order to further clarify the nature of the unconcealment that constitutes being-with-one-another, it is helpful to clarify its scope within the general phenomenon of being-in-the-world. From a naïve viewpoint, I share truth as unconcealment of being with others only when I am actually together with concrete others, but when I am alone, it is obviously not the case that I am sharing something. Dasein is not always with others. Some might claim, then, that Dasein “in itself” does not necessarily share unconcealment with others. However, as already implied earlier, being alone itself is a mode of being-with. The world as a totality of cares always includes references to others, either potential or actual. The very meaning of being alone makes sense only in relation to others, for example in cases of being left alone, unneeded, or undisturbed. And this means that being-alone is a mode of being-with-one-another (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 117; Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 120), such that “the without-one-another is a specific being-with-one-another” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 118). Being-alone is not simply a factual situation in which I am not in close proximity to others, but rather it is a modification of the essential existential mode of being-with-others. In turn, being-with is likewise not essentially a factual state of being near others, but rather is sharing in a more essential way. Being-with is an essential mode of Dasein’s being regardless of ontic and contingent states of affairs in the world. Unconcealment, therefore, is shared to some extent also when I am alone, since it is essential to being-with as such. It is something we share by necessity: “Truth is that in which we share” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 106). This suggests not only that truth as unconcealment is a central aspect of commonality, but also that commonality itself is an aspect of unconcealment. Primordial truth is unconcealment for Dasein, who is existentially structured to be with others, such that “truth is something that Dasein shares with Dasein” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 107). Communality and truth are in this sense equiprimordial. And since being-with is a constitutive moment of Dasein, this implies not only that Dasein is always related to others, but also that it encounters things and others within an already open sphere of accessibility. Dasein never comes forth to meet beings out of an immanence of its own. It is always situated in a public world. For this reason, Heidegger determines that every experience of beings in the world is in its essence potentially shared in virtue of being in a common world: “Being alongside what is present at hand is accordingly not one isolated possibility in which Dasein exists, and being with one another another possibility, rather every being alongside … is being with one another” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 118). Every case of uncovering beings in the world is “shared, because the disclosedness of the There, that is, Da-sein, is necessarily being-with” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 139).

At this point one might raise the objection, based on our everyday experience of the world, that it is possible to discover something previously unknown and in this significant sense be the first to ever experience it. On top of that, one can keep this new discovery to oneself, withholding any knowledge of it from the world. Isn’t this an obvious case in which an experience of something is not shared? This is, of course, an ontic possibility. It is undeniable that scientific discoveries are sometimes witnessed at first only by a single individual. However, the initial private aspect of the new discovery is only a contingent circumstance. When something is discovered, when it enters someone’s awareness, it is already, in principle, something common. That is, it is in principle accessible to anyone. In fact, it is there for everyone to discover. Heidegger himself addresses this objection, discussing cases in which someone has discovered something new and unique, for example, a rare plant (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 127), but chooses to keep this, along with the site of the discovery, to oneself. As a result, others never learn of this rare plant nor of its otherwise unknown location. Again, it seems evident that since the plant and the location are available and accessible only for a particular individual, this is an example for unconcealment of a present-at-hand being that is disclosed only to a single Dasein, thus refuting the claim that truth is always shared. In response to such objections, Heidegger claims that cases of apparently private discovery only demonstrate that someone is keeping the truth to oneself. This act of withholding or hiding something makes sense only against the backdrop of a public and, in principle, shared world. Private experiences in general necessarily involve a certain attitude of retreat from others, either willingly, when one guards something from the public eye, or unwillingly, when one is neglected and forgotten. Hence, the explorer in forsaken lands that discovers a new rarity but chooses not to communicate their discovery to the world, does in a certain sense share this new truth, but in the mode of withholding (Vorenthalten). This does not imply, of course, a factual sharing, but rather indicates that an aspect of unconcealment as such is publicness. The explorer can share their discovery with others because the unconcealment of things, that is, how things appear and get disclosed, is by its nature something common (Gemeinsames). And this is precisely why, when they wish to keep it secret, they “must close up, because this being with presence-at-hand is otherwise commonly disclosed, i.e. unconcealed” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 128).

We are together an openly public and common sphere of unconcealment. To be Dasein is to take part in a sphere of actual and potential manifestness (Offenbarkeit): “Dasein is disclosive, uncovering, and thus bringing with itself partaking in sharing-with, in communicating (mitteilend)” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 130). The unconcealed world stands equally before anyone, openly at anyone’s disposal, while primordially being no one’s world in particular: “Unconcealment never belongs to an individual as such. As something common, it stands publicly at the disposal of everyone, as it were; it must therefore essentially be set free by every Dasein” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 130). As we have seen, Dasein primordially sets the stage for the emergence of beings in a manner which combines passive and active aspects, prior to any individual comportment, as part of a shared open sphere of manifestness. We should likewise distinguish further between the manifestness of things in the world, and the way Dasein itself is unconcealed to itself and to others in the world. Dasein is essentially unconcealed in the manner of discoveredness (Entdecktheit) or disclosedness (Erschlossenheit). These terms denote the existential character of Dasein’s own unconcealment, which is, in contrast to other modes of being, the unconcealment of Dasein in the sense of both a subjective and an objective genitive. Dasein itself gets disclosed, is an object of the process of unconcealment; but it is also, at the same time, the site where things get disclosed. Things are unconcealed and disclosed essentially for Dasein, as a member of a community of sharing in truth and being. “Being with… is disclosing disclosed” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 137).

Now we are in a better position to answer our initial question about the “unity” which characterizes being-with. As has become clear, it does not make much sense to grasp the togetherness of Dasein in terms of a collection. Dasein’s being with others is first and foremost a formal condition of being-in-the-world. It is with others in this sense, not just when it happens to encounter others and stand near them. It is, of course, sometimes with others in this sense of spatial nearness, but this is not the essential sense when it comes to the existential mode of being of Dasein. Dasein is already and always with others in the sense that it moves in the same common sphere of manifestness as others. It is a moment of the unconcealment of this sphere, both as something revealed itself and as an opening in which things are revealed as well as concealed. Dasein is essentially disclosed and disclosing, and to be unconcealed and unconcealing means to relate to a common sphere of understanding. When one says, then, that Mitsein is a moment of Dasein, this means that Dasein is essentially involved in a common sphere of manifestness. For Heidegger, the “Da” of Dasein is a space that “breaks up into itself and yet is not a broken space” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 136). But we should not understand this in physical terms of extended space. Da-sein is a breach (Einbruch) in space not in the sense of taking for itself physical elbowroom, but rather in the sense of constituting a space of intelligibility, of manifestness. Dasein is a being that essentially discloses itself by primordially “breaking open a sphere of manifestness” in which things reveal themselves as possessing sense and in which Dasein finds itself as having sense. Dasein is a harmonious moment of this sphere, in the sense that though it is a breach into space, this space is essentially common with others, as a space of sharing in truth and being. This is why, contrary to others such as Sartre and Levinas, for Heidegger the primordial experience of others does not have the character of a negation or opposition. It is not an experience of other subjects as absent, but rather of a “with” as an original living presence, “not the indeterminateness of emptiness, but rather of fullness” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 142), whose inner complexity flows out of a common “clearing” (Lichtung).

In anticipation of the following sections, it is important to mention that in the framework of a community of sharing in truth, the individuation of Dasein is for Heidegger something akin to dispersion, or, to use the metaphor again, the diffusion of light. That is, the world is always already a shared space of openness (Offenbarkeit), prior to any constitution by a plurality of subjects. While each individual has its own “there,” each is originally taking part in the “the same sphere of manifestness” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 138). Sharing is grounded in the same ontologically prior sphere of openness to the truth of being, and the world as a whole is not divided into separately owned, even interdependent, spheres. We already have it in common in primordial sharing through “letting-it-be.” Such shared letting-be (Seinlassen) entails unconcealment, meaning that before we form any particular comportment to the world, we are first of all part of “a sharing in truth.” That said, as we will subsequently see, an inseparable part of this sphere as a whole is its dynamic movement of immanent differentiation into interdependent and interpermeating parts.

3.1 Sociality and Individuality

In the previous section, we have seen that Heidegger reconstrues subjectivity as Dasein who is essentially in the world. We should understand ourselves in non-egological terms, that is, not as independent and self-subsistent beings who are merely contingently related to each other, but rather as essentially interrelated and absorbed in a world constituted by a holistic web of concerns and ends. But to exist as a self not only means to be in relation to entities in the world. To ex-sist means to stand out of oneself and thus to understand oneself in terms of possibilities, precisely not as something once and for all given and statically present. The characteristics of who we are as Dasein “are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 42). To this we must add that an inseparable aspect of Dasein’s relationality is being-with (Mitsein), the formal condition of sharing the world with others. Both Dasein and other beings in the world refer by necessity to others who are Dasein as well. Dasein is a self only to the extent that it is with other persons, that is, only insofar as it takes part in a shared whole. Sociality is not derivative but rather constitutive of being a self and person in the world.Footnote ¹⁹

That said, the fact that Dasein is indeed a self – a particular ongoing synthesis of facticity and openness to possibilities of which it can say “this is mine” – leads Heidegger to utilize terms that are nevertheless seemingly egological, that is, they appear to posit an “I” as a pole of experiences and possibilities of being. A central example occurs at the outset of part one of Being and Time, where Heidegger asserts that since Dasein “has in each case mineness (Jemeinigkeit), one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it: ‘I am,’ ‘you are’” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 42). This statement seems to harbor the observation that though Dasein’s being refers to the world in constitutive and meaningful ways, in its core it still possesses a pole of individuality from which emanates a constant and unified self-identity, the basis for the recurring reference of pronouns. Further on in the work, one might solidify this impression when Heidegger gives a detailed analysis of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Not only does he oppose an authentic self to a self whose possibilities and self-understanding are taken over by an anonymous public otherness – Anyone (das Man)Footnote ²⁰ – but he likewise repeatedly stresses that anxiety, as well as being-toward-death, involve individualization and non-relational states of being – separation from and breaking with the average and common way of understanding the world – to the seemingly extreme degree that “anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as a ‘solus ipse’” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 188).

To state the problem, on the one hand, Dasein is inherently social, but on the other, it seems that there are dimensions of its being which cannot be related back to sociality. To what extent is Dasein indeed an individual? If being with others constitutes Dasein’s being in essential ways, and if Dasein is only in virtue of its situation and place in a given context, then the ontological boundaries between others and myself become blurry and indistinct. This seems to clearly undermine the picture of Dasein as an “I” who is a truly individual self, that is, who is an ontologically independent thing or substratum in its own right. However, one might assert with seemingly equal justification that a main ontological characteristic of Dasein, and a key theme of Being and Time, that is, authenticity, entails radical individualism. For what sense is there to being one’s own, if there is nothing to own in the first place? Needless to say, such a claim – that Dasein is indeed an ontological individuum – runs up against and even contradicts the non-egological portrayal of Dasein. Given what we have learned of the ontological role of being-with, this tension represents a central ontological difficulty concerning the relations between I and others. What are the fundamental boundaries separating me and others? What limit differentiates between “I” and “You,” “I” and “Anyone,” “I” and “Us,” “I” and “Them,” “I” and “She,” etc.? If the “I” is not a separate and self-sufficient subject, what is left of it as an individual self?

3.2 Dasein as Fundamentally Individual

This problem, in various forms, has baffled many. In what follows, I address key representatives of different views on the topic, while simultaneously exploring different aspects of the theme of sociality in Being and Time. With respect to the question of sociality, earlier commentators understand the relation between the self and others in Heidegger as a struggle between an individual authenticity-seeking self and a coercive social mass identified with the Anyone in Being and Time. For example, Karl Löwith (Reference Löwith1928: 79–82) asserts straightforwardly that the social world is inessential for Heidegger’s conception of existence and Dasein as being-in-the-world, stressing that the starting point of Heidegger’s conception of existence, Dasein’s “mineness,” stands in contrast to others as an anonymous public sphere.Footnote ²¹ This view highlights Heidegger’s assertion that when Dasein understands itself in socially available frameworks, Dasein as its own self “itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 126). According to Löwith’s understanding of Heidegger, then, authentic self-determination is only possible through a retreat and isolation from sociality. In similar fashion, Michael Theunissen (Reference Theunissen and McCann1984: 183) construes Heidegger as portraying an unbridgeable gap between Dasein and Dasein-with (Mit-Dasein), that is, concrete others as they appear in my experience. Individual Dasein, for Theunissen, is characterized by the fullness of its projection of possibilities of being, whereas Dasein-with is abstract in the sense that it lacks such fullness which depends on a prior notion of “mine.” Furthermore, it is precisely this abstract character, says Theunissen, that also lends the inauthentic self – the “anyone-self” – its sense as an alien I, that is, a self who is alienated from its own true authentic self.

Such interpretations of the relations between the self and others in Heidegger’s thought tend to emphasize the individuating role of mutual difference.Footnote ²² And indeed, Heidegger says that when we are involved in the world in our concerns, “there is constant care as to the way one differs from them [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 relationship to them, or whether one’s Dasein already has some priority over them and sets out to keep them suppressed” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 126). In other words, it is undeniable that when I act and go about in the world, I constantly do so in reference to others who I am not, which is to say others different than me.

At the same time, however, it is crucial to pin down the role of difference for Heidegger, not as constitutive for being-with as such, but rather disruptive of it. As Heidegger says about the attention of and care for difference between I and others: “The care about this distance between them is disturbing to Being-with-one-another, although this disturbance is one that is hidden from it” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 126, my emphasis). As discussed in Section 2, alterity as a characteristic of social relations is derivative of a prior condition of fundamental sociality. Especially when it comes to the social dimension of concrete experiences, the opposition between I and others is not original. The contrast arises within a prior shared sphere, our common manifest world. This occurs as a result of a disruptive force or a perceived distance between oneself and others, to which Heidegger refers as distantiality (Abständigkeit). The term “distantiality” not only signifies a movement of separation and division but also likewise entails that Dasein “stands in subjection (Botmässigkeit) to Others” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 126). Put differently, the gap which opens up between others and myself also brings along a peculiar force which pulls me back toward similarity. In situations where difference is explicitly perceived, individuals constantly compare their behavior to that of others, finding themselves simultaneously drawn to both dissimilarity and resemblance.Footnote ²³ As one can oppose oneself to others, one can also fully submit to a demand to cohere with them. Thus, how Dasein understands itself with respect to others takes the relational form of either similarity or difference, against the prior backdrop of a shared world imbued with social significance.

The problem that commentators such as Löwith, Theunissen, and othersFootnote ²⁴ must face is that of giving an account of the ontological status of Dasein’s radical authentic individuality, given that it appears as an accomplishment that takes place on the foundations of an already social world, as an apparent offshoot of socially constituted meaning. Since even the phenomenon of distantiality occurs only on a prior basis of a shared world, and is derivative in this sense, for such commentators the main challenge is to explain how authenticity is not just another mode of sociality. On their view, one becomes a proper individual self by breaking away from an original, primordial background of social meaning, thereby constituting something like an independent “core” of Dasein’s individuality. But that seems to directly contradict the prominent sense of Dasein as an inherently relational being, risking an unaccountable gap between the conception of the self as a by-product of a social whole and the notion of the self as an isolated island.

3.3 Dasein as Fundamentally Social

A possible way out of this dilemma is to reconsider the fundamental role of the social dimension of experience for Dasein’s own self-understanding. As already mentioned, in Being and Time, this dimension is known as the Anyone (das Man). When one fully identifies with others, completely captivated by the pull to similarity, one’s possibilities of being are determined by them. But it is not as though these are any particular others. In average everyday life, “the ‘who’ is not this one, not that one, not oneself (man selbst), not some people (einige), and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter’ the ‘Anyone’” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 126). The Anyone is not a collection of a definite number of Dasein, and therefore not a sum. It is rather an undifferentiated heap to which we belong and to which we are subjected, in a way that overshadows our own differentiated self-identity. “We take pleasure as Anyone takes pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as Anyone sees and judges; likewise, we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as Anyone shrinks back; we find ‘shocking’ what Anyone finds shocking” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 126–127). A fundamental trait of the Anyone is averageness (Durchschnittlichkeit). The subject, who we identify as Anyone, engages things in the world in a manner typical of everyone yet not specific to any particular individual. This averageness dictates to the subdued Dasein what is within the realm of possibility and what is beyond it, effectively excluding and suppressing any disruptive novelty or precedence. Many infer from this description of social experience that Dasein stands against a gross force of conformism, and as Löwith and Theunissen do, conclude that Dasein’s individual self naturally derives from a form of personal rebellion against common social norms.

However, though the authentic self stands in contrast to the Anyone (in a peculiar sense that we will see later), at the same time Dasein owes much of its understanding of the possibilities of its own being to the normativity which the Anyone constitutes and represents. When Dasein is not its authentic self, when it is in the guise of Anyone, it is not radically cut off from authenticity, but rather it remains with an implicit anticipation of it. “Authentic-Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘Anyone’; it is rather an existentiell modification of the ‘Anyone’ – of the ‘Anyone’ as an essential existentiale” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 130). Early interpreters think of Dasein as if it could dispense of the sociality of its experience, failing to recognize that it is a formal condition of being Dasein in general. One can say that the main problem with earlier interpretations of Being and Time is that they don’t take seriously enough Heidegger’s claim that being-with is a constitutive moment of Dasein. The only role assigned to being-with under their view is a negative one, a background which Dasein must relinquish in order to be authentic.Footnote ²⁵ Such a view, however, underplays Heidegger’s effort to transcend the boundaries of traditional subjectivity. As Fred Dallmayr (Reference Dallmayr1980: 240) notes, “care” (Sorge) – Heidegger’s designation for the totality of Dasein’s existential structure – is not simply an alternative term for intentionality, but an inseparable involvement and entanglement of Dasein in the world.

Building on this observation, other commentators emphasize that the Anyone is a main source of intelligibility in Dasein’s world. As such, the existential moment of Anyone does not possess a merely negative sense, but it plays the positive role of endowing being-in-the-world with meaning. A key representative of this approach to Dasein’s being-with is Hubert Dreyfus (Reference Dreyfus1991, Reference Dreyfus1995, Reference Dreyfus and Polt2005, Reference Dreyfus and Wrathall2013).Footnote ²⁶ According to Dreyfus, the self-understanding and self-interpretation of the individual subject depend on shared social practices that are embodied by the Anyone. Even though it is “I” who comports my own self toward things and acts in the world, this “I” always presupposes a shared intelligible and meaningful world in terms of which it makes sense of itself. Meaning is in its nature something common, says Dreyfus, and thus the source of meaning is not to be found in a particular individual – Dasein as an individual self – but rather in the average and shared way of going about the world as anyone does. As Dreyfus interprets Heidegger, the intelligibility of the world, encompassing all of Dasein’s ends and purposeful comportments, derives from social norms and practices. In other words, Dasein appropriates the meanings bestowed by society – understood as a historical open totality of norms and roles – and understands itself in these terms. According to this approach, a plurality of Dasein uncovers a common world in the sense that different Daseins share from the outset a “background familiarity” with things, environments, possibilities of activity, and de facto anything each individual Dasein potentially or actually encounters during its life. Such familiarity amounts to and continually gets determined by the “normal,” that is, the correct way of doing things.Footnote ²⁷ The ontic discovering of things, events, and others, including my own self, is possible only in virtue of this availability and familiarity whose ontological source is, simply put, “society.” Thus, in the framework of the Dreyfusian interpretation of Heidegger, society is not only a necessary correlate of the world as public and universally accessible, not merely an ontological region of a “public sphere,” but it also determines the nature of any form of publicness and universality as such qua an overarching normativity. Though we usually tend to think of norms – rules dictating proper and wrong attitudes and modes of behavior – strictly as part of a human realm of conventional nomos, this interpretation of Heidegger extends the scope of social normativity to include all that is readily available to Dasein. Thus, this approach tends to view any relation to the world whatsoever, and any graspable being, as mediated by social normativity. A notable example is equipment (Zeug). Though some might think that there are factors other than social norms which constrain and determine what tools are – for example, the material conditions that prescribe the suitability of a certain alloy for use in the electronics industry – commentators such as Dreyfus usually make the case that such constraints ultimately make sense only as part of a wider context of means and ends. As Haugeland puts it: “Hammers, nails, boards, and drills, screwdrivers, screws, and glue are all bound together in a (large) nexus of intertwined roles, instituted by the norms of carpentry practice, and that is what makes them what they are” (Reference Haugeland1982: 17).

However, it should be noted that equating what something is with its functional role within a nexus of practices does not mean that society creates or produces it. As Carman observes:

For this group of interpreters, what it is to be something strictly refers to how it is understood and interpreted in a communal context of functional significance, and not to its brute factual existence nor to what it is “in itself.”Footnote ²⁸

Furthermore, in response to the obviously pejorative sense the term “Anyone” has in Being and Time as tied to fallenness, self-alienation, and concealing of possibilities, wherein Dasein is “cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 170), Dreyfus states that Heidegger did not make explicit that there is a distinction between conformity responsible for the world’s intelligibility and oppressive conformism.Footnote ²⁹ For Dreyfus, the Anyone has a positive ontological function which is distinguished from its negative ontic function. Conformity has an existential sense that constitutes Dasein’s understanding of the world, whereas conformism is the existentiell cause of the notorious “levelling down” by the Anyone.Footnote ³⁰ Though Dreyfus does recognize that authenticity implies an insight transcending the average intelligibility of the Anyone, he ultimately thinks that such understanding necessarily involves the second-order realization that “shared background practices” are the fundamental basis for knowing how to comport ourselves in the world as we do, with no further justification, that is, with nothing beyond them other than a radical groundlessness.Footnote ³¹

Frederick Olafson has accused Dreyfus of assimilating Heidegger’s account of Dasein to Wittgenstein’s theory of the rule-governed character of human life, to the extent that key aspects of the analytic of Dasein are unjustifiably neglected. One of Olafson’s chief concerns in this context is the status of Dasein as an individual and independent being in its own right. In his words: “Dreyfus wants Dasein to be a mode of comportment rather than an entity as Heidegger repeatedly declares it to be” (Olafson, Reference Olafson1994: 50). As we have seen, according to Dreyfus, Dasein is fundamentally determined by the Anyone, and is an “I” or self only in a manner parasitic on previous social roles and practices. Olafson objects to this interpretation by claiming that Heidegger maintains throughout all sections of Being and Time the formal distinctness of the “I” intact. What, or better put the who, that fluctuates between the self and the non-self, between authenticity and inauthenticity, itself represents the modality of constancy and independence (Olafson, Reference Olafson1994: 56). To some extent, Olafson falls back upon the earlier understanding of an individualistic Dasein expressed by Löwith and Theunissen. Moreover, rather than serving as a condition and constituting source for intelligibility, for Olafson the concept of “being-with” has a narrower scope, designating a confined ontological region of social beings and relations in the world. And not only that, instead of viewing the relations between the authentic self and the Anyone as exhaustive of the relations between “I” and others, Olafson suggests that “das Man is at bottom a deformation of Mitsein” (Reference Olafson1994: 59; compare Knudsen (Reference Knudsen2022)), which is to say that there is a genuine form of being-with not associated with the mode of being Anyone. The Anyone, he says, should not be conflated with being with others in general, for it is merely a distorted modality of being with other Daseins in the world.Footnote ³²

Olafson puts into doubt the claim that being-with, in any form – whether in an authentic or inauthentic mode – fully constitutes the intelligibility of our world, by presenting a counterargument that targets the constraints and conditions that give rise to ready-to-hand beings. As we will see, this critique also has implications for the status of the ontological independence of the self. According to Olafson, when we are discussing the mode of being of readiness-to-hand, it is mistaken to reduce the whole meaning of a ready-to-hand thing to social convention, because there is a crucial and unbridgeable difference between social norms and norms dictated by know-how.Footnote ³³ It is simply common sense to recognize that acting according to social conventions or norms is a different type of rule-governed behavior than the skillful manipulation of a tool. Hans Bernhard Schmid, developing this line of thought, points out that goal-oriented action has different ends than norm-oriented action. Whereas the first aims at instrumental success, the latter seeks to conform to social propriety.Footnote ³⁴ This difference in criteria reflects a difference between two types of ready-to-hand things. To use the examples given by Schmid, the first group consists in things that are constituted by social norms, such as chess figures, banknotes, and traffic signs, while the second group includes things whose function is not determined merely by social norms, such as hammers, drugs, and bridges.Footnote ³⁵ The being of the latter type of ready-to-hand things is also determined by material necessity and instrumental utility. In other words, a chess figure is so only in virtue of the social norms, the rules of the game, that determine its function within the boundaries of the game. But the effectiveness of a drug is not merely a matter of social normativity, for a drug is effective regardless of our social beliefs in its proper use. In Heidegger’s words: “A covered railway platform takes account of bad weather; an installation for public lighting takes account of the darkness” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 71), not to mention that when we make use of such types of equipment, “the environing Nature is ready-to-hand along with it” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 71). This implies that readiness-to-hand is a mode of being that simply cannot be reduced to the narrower sphere of social normativity, as Dreyfus would have it. There is clearly, therefore, a stratum of the world which is not determined by social normativity as we usually understand the concept, that is, in terms of social conventions. This implies that our manipulation of equipment is itself not merely a matter of assimilating social norms, and that circumspection (Umsicht) holds within itself an element of disclosure that is not referred directly to “society” in the ontic sense.

Before we continue to inquire into the apparently nonsocial aspects of Dasein, we would do well to recapitulate the main positions discussed thus far. Broadly speaking, we can see in the secondary literature on the role of das Man two views on the ontological status of individual Dasein. On the one hand, we encounter a “subjectivist” or “individualist” view, according to which Dasein is at base an individual. According to this interpretation, Dasein’s self-intelligibility is irreducible to a public form of normativity that deems things intelligible by determining their proper mode of being. The possibility of individual authenticity indicates that an individual Dasein who is truly itself, genuinely “its own,” does not understand itself in terms of the public world. But on the other, one also finds a “collectivist” view which claims that individual Dasein is a derivative of the Anyone. What it is to be a self, according to this approach, always means to either conform with or disobey norms and common practices. What one does, as well as what and who one understands oneself to be, gets defined and determined in advance in relation to what Anyone does, whether this takes the form of complete conformity or radical opposition. Under this view, authenticity as an individualization makes sense only in relation to an existing framework of everyday intelligibility. It seems that the main obstacle for the subjectivists is to explain the source of authentic self-intelligibility, whereas the collectivists face the challenge of explaining in terms of social normativity the natural conditions which constrain some human practices. We can formulate accordingly the following two questions: Is individuality outside of a social context at all intelligible? And in turn, can we simply reduce the natural to the social?

3.4 Beyond Individualism and Collectivism

Let us revisit the theme of circumspection. A key objection to the collectivist view is that circumspection must take into account the natural conditions which determine the proper manipulation of equipment regardless of any social belief about the nature of its material. It remains for us to decide, however, the extent to which the “natural” or “nonsocial” determination of the proper use of equipment necessarily implies an individual function of discovering the world that is radically cut off from sociality. We have already seen that a minimal formal condition of being in the world is that we share it with others. The world is a public sphere in which things and people appear and disappear to us. In the context of circumspection, one cannot deny that every know-how possesses a general and impersonal character that transcends the particularity of a singular individual. It may be that one cannot reduce this general character to common social beliefs, but its generality implies the public and shared aspect of experience, which we, with Heidegger, denote as “being-with.” As Heidegger himself determines: “Any work with which one concerns oneself is ready-to-hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop but also in the public world. Along with the public world, the environing Nature (die Umweltnatur) is discovered and is accessible to everyone” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 71). As we have emphasized earlier, the world is essentially public, as a shared sphere of accessible beings, and thus every work done manipulates something that is in principle accessible to anyone. It is worth mentioning that even Olafson, a notable representative of the subjectivist view, does not deny that Dasein acts in an open and common public world. He rather targets the claim that a skill or know-how is determined solely by social practices.Footnote ³⁶ The generality and impersonality in question in such cases are different from those of social normativity, precisely for the reasons previously stated. Even if something is accessible to every Dasein, this does not mean that Mitsein, understood by Olafson strictly as the ontological region of the social sphere, determines what this something is. The core of the disagreement, then, concerns the scope of social normativity in its relations to the world. Does it turn out in the end that the abstract, anonymous, and general public aspects of a shared world transcend the boundaries of intelligibility which the Anyone dictates?

Based on Heidegger’s Einleitung lectures, I have demonstrated earlier that the world and the beings in it are essentially shared. We share beings in a primordial manner by letting them be together. There is something inherently common in the most basic character of truth as unconcealment. The image of “clearing” invokes an opening which is accessible to all who find themselves within it. Better put, all those who share a clearing are this clearing. We found that before any comportment, any proper or improper manipulation of equipment, we first share that which is to be manipulated simply by letting it be there for us in the first place. By being receptive and responsive to its being there for us, “this common thing makes possible being-with-one-another” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 103). Being-with is a sharing in truth (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 107). This “letting” character of the commonality of experience does not take a stance on proper or improper ways of being, nor does it determine the in-order-to (Um-zu) structure of the interrelated roles of things. It does not set an end as a possibility of Dasein’s being, but rather keeps open a shared space in which such possibilities can appear and make sense. It is a necessary condition for making a decision on what or who it is to be Dasein, but does not provide the terms in which Dasein makes sense of its decision. The proper and improper, what Anyone does or does not do, is apparent only because we already “let” it appear as such. Thus, though there might be aspects of the world whose being transcends social normativity per se, it is not true that for Heidegger being-with constrains only a definite part of our experience. On the contrary, being-with is an integral dimension of the world as shared, conditioning our every comportment.

In response to the subjectivist position, one should answer that individuality is simply unimaginable outside of a social context, regardless of the extent to which social normativity determines what it is to be this individual. To be is already to be in a public and open sphere in which beings appear and manifest themselves. And in response to the collectivists, one should say that though the social permeates every form of being in the world, this does not necessarily mean that everything derives from social normativity. It is evident, then, that a sole focus on social normativity does not propel us forward in the attempt to pin down the ontological status of Dasein as an individual self. For this reason, though I have implied that there is a difference between being-with as a common clearing, or a shared “letting be,” and the Anyone, in this Element I shall leave open the question of the exact scope of social normativity. It might even turn out that an attempt to delineate a clear and distinct boundary of social normativity is eo ipso impossible due to the inherent vagueness of the subject matter. Regardless of the scope of social normativity, however, the problem of the ontological status of individual Dasein still stands, and therefore we must look for other paths of inquiry to solve it.

To demonstrate this observation, it is helpful to briefly review Steven Crowell’s interpretation of the individual-normativity nexus which may be seen as a representative of interpretations of Heidegger, which neither reduce individual Dasein to a derivative of the Anyone nor reduce intelligibility in general to social normativity.Footnote ³⁷ Crowell claims that normativity as such, regardless of the question whether it is purely social or not, represents only one aspect of a comprehensive account of intelligibility. Intelligibility requires just as much a responsiveness to third-person normativity. In this regard, Crowell contends that a key accomplishment of Being and Time is its ability to provide an account of intentionality that preserves the fundamental status of “first-person authority” (Reference Crowell2013: 170) without reducing it to conditions and characteristics of behavior describable from a third-person perspective. Crowell further argues that we cannot trace self-awareness merely to Dasein’s self-understanding in terms of the world. It is only the breakdown of Dasein’s world which comes with anxiety, being-toward-death, and conscience that uncovers the irreducible nature of subjectivity as an “I.” For Crowell, however, the “first-person” is neither the anyone-self nor the authentic self, “but the hidden condition of both” (Reference Crowell2013: 183). It is a certain movement of negativity and negation of the world itself, which at the same time constitutes what matters to us by embodying first-person authority. Crowell identifies this first-person with the call of conscience and continues to claim that it is, for Heidegger, the source of reason in the guise of an inner self-demand to either adopt or reject norms.

Non-reductive readings of Dasein such as Crowell’s attempt to maintain the equal importance of the public world and the self-aware individual for making sense of what it is to be a self who understands the world from its own first-person perspective. In Heideggerian terms, the individual and the collective are “equiprimordial.” However, such arguments only underscore the challenge of reconciling Dasein’s individuality with its embeddedness in a social world. The question regarding the ontological relations between the “I” and others in Heidegger’s thought endures and is even intensified. The fundamental question is how an entity such as Dasein can simultaneously possess independence – as a self in its own right – and dependence – as a function of a social context – in ontological terms, given that we cannot dismiss Dasein’s unique selfhood as a mere derivative of the collective to which it belongs, nor can we be satisfied with any explanatory gaps between first-person and third-person accounts of Dasein.

3.5 The “With” in Between

To restate the problem in the framework of Being and Time’s account of authenticity, the challenge is to explain in what sense, when Dasein stands before the necessity of its death as “its own-most non-relational possibility” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 304), it is not radically cut off from the social dimension of its experience, from its with-world (Mitwelt, Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 125), and the truth it reveals is not privately its own, while at the same time maintaining its nonderivative individuality. Otherwise, we risk falling into the same pitfalls that threaten the interpretations discussed earlier. Jean-Luc Nancy has perceptively identified in Being and Time the possibility of thinking about a with as a middle ground between undifferentiated collective identity and an external juxtaposition of otherwise unrelated subjects:

Nancy thought that though Heidegger opened the possibility of thinking about togetherness in such terms, at the same time he closed it by identifying being-with-one-another with a particular people or community. Nancy as well as others, relying mainly on SZ §74, sees in this work the germination of Heidegger’s conception of the people (das Volk) as an authentic form of being-with, and thus as leaning toward populist collectivism.Footnote ³⁸ While Heidegger in the thirties attempts to merge the political and the ontological in dubious ways, I believe that in the period of Being and Time this relation presents no more than a question. At this point, it suffices to note that I find no explicit philosophical argument in this period for reducing the social dimension of experience, an existential condition of being in the world, to particular ontic existentiell possibilities of a definite form of political identification and engagement. This does not mean such a reduction is impossible, nor that Heidegger the man would not see such a reduction as legitimate (as he indeed later did). But to gain an honest picture of Heidegger’s early thought of sociality, we must suspend our judgment in this Element about its connection with his notorious political commitments. This approach is beneficial not only for reasons of hermeneutical historical accuracy but also for a future rethinking of the unfulfilled possibilities of Heidegger’s thought in general and social ontology in particular. With these remarks in mind, unlike Nancy, who saw Being and Time as a missed opportunity, I argue that the model of a primordial with – holding the inherent complexity of being both dependent and independent – is not absent from Heidegger’s thought, but is precisely present as a necessary condition of authenticity and truth in general.Footnote ³⁹

It is my contention that a certain form of mereology, that is, a theory of parthood relations, is the key to settling the apparently contradictory relations between the I and the community to which it belongs. Relying on the observation that a logic of parts and wholes, whose origin can be traced back to Husserl’s Third Investigation, is operative in Heidegger’s thought, I will show that Dasein’s individuality and communality function as an interplay of interdependent part and whole. Against this background, it becomes evident that when Dasein stands before its death, it is non-relational only with regard to social normativity as a concealing element, that is, the Anyone, but not with regard to the movement of truth as unconcealment, since authenticity as a disclosure presupposes being-with-one-another as a common sharing in truth. A mereological approach to being-with not only resolves the apparent contradiction between Dasein’s sociality and individuality, but also establishes a conception of primordial being-with that is ontologically prior to a conception of being-with as a particular or national body lacking any ontologically significant inner self-differentiation. Primordial being-with consists in a fundamental commonality, functioning as an essential and necessary aspect of truth as unconcealment, that does not dissolve individual Dasein in a larger collective body, but rather is a dynamic, complicated unity of interdependent and interpenetrating moments.

4.1 Husserl’s Theory of Wholes and Parts

Though this has rarely been discussed in the scholarship, Heidegger’s thought often employs concepts that directly mention part-whole structures.Footnote ⁴⁰ For instance, a quick perusal through Being and Time reveals that Heidegger analyzes the totality (Ganzheit) of the structural whole (Strukturganzen) and the whole (Ganze) of the existential constitution of Dasein, as well as Dasein’s being-a-whole (Ganzsein) and potentiality-for-being-a-whole (Ganzseinkönnen). Prima facie, Heidegger’s terminology clearly reflects a concern for wholeness. Though this cursory examination alone does not substantiate any particular significance to part-whole relations as such in his fundamental ontology, a closer analysis reveals that Heidegger does possess a profound and nuanced conception of parthood, at least around the years of the publication of his magnum opus. We can begin to unravel this conception by observing a footnote that appears in the midst of a discussion of the ontological sense of totality and the “not-yet” (Noch-nicht) character of the temporal structure of Dasein:

The footnote calls our attention to different conceptions of parthood and wholeness, against the backdrop of familiar concepts passed on to us by the Western philosophical tradition. However, Heidegger also suggests that the second division of Being and Time investigates as yet unstudied variations of part-whole structures and relations. As we will soon see, it is highly significant that, in this context, Heidegger refers the reader to the third investigation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations which he singles out as “a thorough analysis of the structures in question.” Though we cannot know from this remark alone what was Heidegger’s full philosophical opinion of Husserl’s analysis, it serves as a starting point and clue for an inquiry into Heidegger’s own understanding of parthood, that is, his own “mereology.”

Husserl’s Third Investigation, titled “On the Theory of Wholes and Parts,” presents a general logic of parthood that defines the basic a-priori part-whole relations to which any conceivable object adheres by necessity. It begins with a discussion of the difference between independent and nonindependent objects. As Kit Fine (Reference Fine, Smith and Smith2005) notes, Husserl sees here a striking ontological difference between an independent datum and its dependent parts. Husserl puts forth an understanding of this distinction in terms of relations between parts and wholes. We can understand virtually every aspect and thing in our world as part of some larger whole encompassing it. Objects can be essentially related to each other either as wholes to parts, or as coordinated parts of the same whole, implying that “every object is either actually or possibly a part, i.e. there are actual or possible wholes that include it” (Husserl, Reference Husserl and Findlay2001: 4). Needless to say, our world abounds with complex wholes, not to mention that it itself is a plurality of disjoined things which at the same time form one whole. It is not surprising, then, that Husserl dedicates the greater part of the Third Investigation to clarify the nature of complex wholes, particularly to the different kinds of relations by which parts join together to form one whole. His intention is to give a general and unitary account for all the different relations that give rise to complex wholes, while also observing their differences.Footnote ⁴¹

Husserl classifies such complexity into two main types, by distinguishing between two senses of being a part. When something is a part of a whole, it is either a “piece” (Stück) or a “moment” (Moment). The key difference between these two types of parthood concerns the nature of the separability of the part from other parts of the whole as well as from this whole itself. On the one hand, when we observe pieces, it is possible to detach one piece from other pieces and from the whole of which they are all a part. Though the relation of parthood obtains in virtue of the fact that all pieces compose together a composite whole, each piece can exist, at least in thought, on its own. If we take a bookshelf as an example, we can immediately see that it is a composite whole, composed of shelves, side panels, and a back panel. It is possible to detach each and every one of these parts from the rest, either in thought or in practice, without that part ceasing to exist or to hold sense. Not only that, it can even persist as an individual and relatively independent entity in its own right.

A moment, on the other hand, is a part that cannot be detached from other parts of the same whole, nor from the whole as such. Moments make up wholes in a stronger sense of interpenetrating and permeating one another. Consider a bookshelf again as an example, but this time focus on one of its shelves. One perceives surface, extension, color, and brightness. Each of these features depends on the others for its appearance and presence, making them necessarily copresent. We cannot perceive or conceive of the brightness of a shelf, without it being the brightness of a certain color, for example, mahogany. But for it to be possible to perceive this hue of mahogany, the color must appear as a feature of a surface. And again, a surface is inconceivable without extension. It is significant to note the character of the necessary connection between these different aspects or features of the shelf. The necessity in play is not that of a necessary connection between distinct parts of an aggregate. Rather, the necessity implies a stronger connection in which the parts are to some extent indistinct, since there is a sense in which one part permeates the other and vice versa. Perceiving color implies the perception of a colored surface, and so forth. Furthermore, this implies that any elimination, or even modification, of at least one “moment” of a whole entails the obliteration or modification of the other moments, precisely because each, in differing degrees, is an essential component of the others. Moments cannot appear without their counterpart moments, upon which they essentially depend.

Husserl further solidifies and clarifies the difference between dependence and independence through the concept of “foundation” (Fundierung). According to Husserl: “If a law of essence means that an A cannot as such exist except in a more comprehensive unity which connects it with an M, we say that an A as such requires foundation by an M or also that an A as such needs to be supplemented by an M” (Husserl, Reference Husserl and Findlay2001: 25). Founded parts, then, require the presence of other parts, while founding parts serve as the condition upon which the former depend, while themselves not necessarily being dependent. A relation of foundedness can be either one-sided or reciprocal (Husserl, Reference Husserl and Findlay2001: 27). Furthermore, Husserl also defines an object that can be regarded as a whole a concretum, while something that can be presented only as a moment is an abstractum (Husserl, Reference Husserl and Findlay2001: 27–28). An abstract thing is a moment that must always be completed by additional aspects.

In sum, wholes can consist either of pieces, which can be perceived separately from their whole and from each other, or of moments that essentially depend on other elements of the whole to appear. Pieces are brought together to form one whole through a contingent collection of independent parts, whereas the unities of moments stem from a priori laws of ideal essence. To this extent, the essential rules determining the necessarily apodictic character of unity in the world are established by the logic of moments, that is, by relations of foundedness. In Husserl’s words: “The only true unifying factors, we may roundly say, are relations of ‘foundation’” (Husserl, Reference Husserl and Findlay2001: 36).

Einar Øverenget has claimed that Heidegger’s use of a mereological terminology is indebted to Husserl’s Third Investigation to the extent that there is a “structural isomorphism” between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophical projects.Footnote ⁴² I believe that Øverenget’s claim is too far-reaching. As I will demonstrate, though it is evident that Heidegger does maintain a basic distinction which Husserl discusses already in the Logical Investigations, ultimately Heidegger does not share with Husserl the exact same conception of rule-governed part-whole relations, but rather introduces a radically new understanding of part-whole relations. Bringing into relief this conception, as I will show, uncovers new aspects of Heidegger’s overall argument in Being and Time with respect to the individuality of Dasein, and thus presents us a proper picture of the relations between the self and others. In this respect, though I will demonstrate that Heidegger incorporates key elements of Husserl’s basic distinction between pieces and moments, it will become evident that the phenomenological application of these concepts in his analysis of being-with puts forth a novel understanding of both parthood and sociality.

4.2 Heidegger’s Appropriation of Husserlian Mereology

How, then, does Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes come into play in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology? It is first key to highlight the textual fact that Heidegger consistently uses the terms Moment and Stück, as well as related terms, throughout his work.Footnote ⁴³ He also makes clear, through the way he employs them, that his basic understanding of these concepts does not depart from the way Husserl defined them. Putting aside for now the question of the exact extent to which Husserl’s logic of parts and wholes determines how Heidegger’s fundamental ontology unfolds, it is significant that the basic sense of these terms in Being and Time maintains their basic philosophical meaning that they have in the Third Investigation. These facts should be emphasized, especially considering how they have been somewhat obscured by the English translations of Being and Time. Although Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation, as well as Stambaugh’s, renders the term Stück in English as piece (e.g., Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 151), neither translates Moment in a way that allows the English reader to encounter these terms in their original philosophical sense, let alone their possible technical Husserlian sense. Macquarrie and Robinson translate the term Moment as either item (e.g., Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 41) or factor (e.g., Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 53), whereas Stambaugh maintains consistently factor throughout the text. In both cases, the original opposition between piece and moment is downplayed, and perhaps for this reason, most English readings neglect the significance of this distinction. Therefore, it is essential to recognize that Heidegger was, in fact, employing the same terms as those found in Husserl. On this basis we can then demonstrate that, at least in a simple terminological sense, Heidegger and Husserl assign these concepts the same meaning.

To further demonstrate this textual fact, we now turn to cases in which Heidegger employs the term Stück. When Heidegger discusses care (Sorge) as the basic being of Dasein, in the framework of an inquiry into the possibility of grasping together the different moments of the “totality of Dasein’s structural whole,” he says that the different characteristics of Dasein, as disclosed through the phenomenon of anxiety, do not simply “compose” Dasein. In his words: “These existential characteristics are not pieces belonging to something composite, one of which might sometimes be missing; but there is woven together in them a primordial context which makes up that totality of the structural whole which we are seeking” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 191). If we recall our discussion of Husserl’s Third Investigation, pieces which are parts of a composite whole are themselves potentially independent wholes. This means that each piece can exist on its own, even if it is currently joined together with other pieces to form a whole. And indeed, in this passage Heidegger understands “something composite” (Kompositum) as a thing composed of relatively independent parts, for some of them “might sometimes be missing,” that is, the parts are not necessarily connected to the whole. He demonstrates a similar use of the term as referring to essentially separate and not necessarily interrelated parts when he talks about the as-structure of understanding. “The phenomenon of the ‘as’-structure,” he remarks, “is manifestly not to be dissolved or broken up ‘into pieces’” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 151). This statement emphasizes the futility of explaining the unity of understanding (Verstehen) and interpretation (Auslegung) by separating it into more fundamental elements. Such an understanding of “pieces,” again, shows that Heidegger is thinking of a piece in terms of an independent concretum which one joins to other concreta to form synthetic wholes.

Furthermore, it is striking that Heidegger contrasts the way pieces come together to form a composite thing with “a primordial context.” Going back again to our analysis of Husserl’s understanding of piece and moment, we should bear in mind that pieces, in contrast to moments, not only do not depend on the whole of which they are a part, nor on other parts of the same whole, but they also do not demonstrate any kind of interpenetration with other pieces. Thus, the elimination of a piece leaves the other coexisting contents that make up the whole unaffected. But the complexity that characterizes unities made up of moments displays a close and necessary interpenetration of parts, in which different moments of the whole permeate each other, in the sense that they are simply inseparable. Heidegger is implying in this passage a similar notion when he says that in contrast to a composite thing made up of “pieces,” the whole of Dasein consists in a “primordial context” whose parts are “woven together.” For Heidegger, then, there is a contrast between a collection of “pieces” and a prior primordial type of unity.

To refer to the nature of such primordial unity, Heidegger employs the concept of “moment.” In the introduction to the first division of Being and Time, Heidegger outlines the basic manner in which Dasein’s fundamental structure of Being-in-the-world presents itself to analysis:

From this opening passage, it is apparent that Heidegger clarifies from the outset that the parts of the whole structure he seeks to analyze are not parts in the sense of pieces, but rather moments. The primordial whole to which Heidegger is referring here contrasts sharply with a mere “pieced together” assembly, such as an arbitrary collection of otherwise unrelated parts. The “a priori” structure of Dasein is regarded as a primordial form of unity, in which Dasein is constituted not from preexistent independent parts, but from moments that are fundamental to its being. To properly comprehend these moments, we cannot consider them individually or through abstraction as if they were entirely separate from the whole. Instead, we must continuously maintain the whole in our field of focus during examination, since these moments are essentially inseparable. But are we, with this claim, justified in taking Heidegger’s employment of the concept of moment to indicate the phenomena of interpenetration, interdependence, and interpermeation?

In a further discussion of the structure of being-in-the-world, while addressing the moment of being-in (In-sein) as such, Heidegger offers us a direct answer: “Emphasis upon any one of these constitutive moments signifies that the others are emphasized along with it; this means that in any such case the whole phenomenon gets seen” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 53). The moments are not only inseparable from the whole, such that they cannot be perceived independently of it, but they are also interdependent. They are so closely integrated that one cannot exist without the other. At the same time, however, “while being-in-the-world cannot be broken into contents which may be pieced together, this does not prevent it from having several constitutive moments in its structure” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 53). That is, the wholeness of the world does not rule out complexity. The world is not a simple “one,” and in fact, the inner complexity of this phenomenon is essential to its being as such.

This is especially evident in the case of ready-to-hand things and the “in-order-to” as a holistic structure of meaning. As I have mentioned at the outset of this Element, to the being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, which enables it to be the particular being – qua ready-to-hand equipment – that it is. “Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to…’ (etwas um-zu)” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 68). As the example given earlier goes, a hammer is what it is because it is for driving nails, and its being is also constituted by a larger context of things that serve a common function, such as the workshop in which it is used as part of a wider context of making further things. The main point is that the mode of being of things, what and how they are in the world, is always a moment within a web of complex interconnected contexts, all of which reflect potential ways for Dasein to be. And this potential for being makes sense only against the backdrop of these various involvements, as it depends on the structure of in-order-to. It is highly inaccurate to interpret our interaction with the world in terms of relations between independent and preexistent entities in extended space. Instead, it must be seen as arising on the basis of dependent moments that collectively form a dynamic whole.

Let us now recapitulate the key points that constitute Heidegger’s understanding of piece and moment. A piece is an independent part of a whole, implying that it is relatively self-sufficient, and it can be separated from the other parts of the whole. Heidegger characterizes this mode of unity as a categorial characteristic of present-at-hand beings. The way present-at-hand beings are together is an exterior juxtaposition, just as pieces make up a whole: A present-at-hand being can be detached from this collection of beings, and it will maintain its essential character as this given present-at-hand being. Thus, its relations to other present-at-hand beings are contingent. In contrast, a moment is a dependent part of a whole, whose being is inseparable from the whole and its other parts. Moments permeate each other in their ways of being, in relations of codependence and codetermination. The way they form and participate in unity characterizes the mode of being of Dasein, as well as ready-to-hand beings in their necessary relation to Dasein. Heidegger accordingly analyzes different phenomena peculiar to Dasein, such as fear (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 142), understanding (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 146), discourse (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 162–163), anxiety (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 190–191), and care (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 180–181), in temporal terms of moments and the complex wholes in which they necessarily take part. It is clear, then, that Dasein itself in its being is a complex dynamic unity of moments. Beings reveal themselves to Dasein through an ongoing interplay of moments, and this reflects the dynamic structure of Dasein itself.

And yet, Heidegger’s conception of part-whole relations differs from Husserl’s in a way that warrants particular attention. Rather than describing constitutive relations in terms of “foundation,” Being and Time is replete with various uses of the term “ground” (Grund), whether as a standalone noun, a noun in a compound construction – for example, as in “basic constitution” (Grundverfassung, Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 52f) – or as a verb (gründen).Footnote ⁴⁴ In all these uses the main sense refers to that which makes something what it is, or that is fundamental for its being. For example, Heidegger says that “spatiality is not discoverable at all except on the basis (auf dem Grunde) of the world” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 113). And in his words, being-with “grounds” everyday selfhood, “the ‘subject’ of everydayness – the ‘Anyone’” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 114). In this respect, grounding occurs as a relation whose operation parallels Husserl’s concept of foundation (Fundierung). To be grounded as a y in x means being part of a unity in which both x and y participate, with x being fundamental for y, just like to be founded means “that an A cannot as such exist except in a more comprehensive unity which connects it with an M” (Husserl, Reference Husserl and Findlay2001: 25). Like founding relations, grounding can also be mutual, as in the case of the moments of being-in-the-world, as well as in the grounding relation between spatiality and world, where “space is still one of the things that is constitutive for the world” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 113). However, Heidegger’s concept of Grund implies a richer range of meanings, all of which are key for a full grasp of its significance: not only basis but also ground, bottom, soil, cause, motivation, explanation, and reason. Moreover, as Heidegger will increasingly emphasize in later years, Grund is fundamentally linked to Abgrund (Abyss), and not merely in a verbal sense.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Being and Time, Heidegger does not explicitly address these noncoincidental connotations in any thematic discussion of the term. However, one finds a passing comment in his discussion of understanding and interpretation where he says that “a ‘ground’ becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is itself the abyss (Abgrund) of meaninglessness” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 152). Despite its brevity, this remark underscores precisely where Heidegger both intersects with and diverges from Husserl on this issue. A ground (Grund) can paradoxically point to groundlessness, to an abyss (Abgrund), for example, as in the case of death as a ground of authentic selfhood. However, that very fact is accessible to understanding only in its intelligibility and meaningfulness. In analogy with Husserl’s concept of foundation, then, ground largely signifies the structures of dependence that characterize meaning (Sinn). Thus, though we certainly must be aware of the full scope of the concept of “ground,” which far exceeds that of “foundation,” it is nevertheless evident that the latter can still serve as a heuristic concept that highlights one main characteristic of the former: the part-whole relations of grounding obtaining between different constitutive moments of Dasein.

That said, it is also evident that Heidegger interweaves into his holist understanding of the self-world nexus a new conception of parthood and wholeness that challenges traditional mereological views. While Heidegger employs a Husserlian distinction, its application ultimately surpasses its original meaning in the very way parthood itself is understood, and not only in the relations between parts, that is, in the shift from “foundation” to “ground.” The broader framework of his fundamental ontology suggests that traditional philosophical terms such as part/whole, piece/moment, and concretum/abstractum take on new significance, in alignment with the attempt to analyze the dynamic unfolding of the being of beings. By introducing new conceptions of parthood, Heidegger brings into relief the priority of temporal manifestation over unchanging presence that we also see in the emergence of his conception of ground. Whereas Husserl distinguishes between piece and moment to shed light on different aspects of objects, Heidegger’s conception of dependent parthood shifts away from thinking of objects as such. Although dependence, interpenetration, and permeation continue to denote aspects of static entities in the world, Heidegger reinterprets them as primordially indicating how Dasein discloses and experiences the world and its being.

Going back to the example of a bookshelf given above, while one can either disassemble it into pieces or consider its integral visual aspects in their necessary copresence with other aspects, for Heidegger one can truly grasp the being of the bookshelf itself only in the more profound sense that it arises as a moment-part of a wider synchronic and diachronic context. Such parthood differs in significant respects from an objectification of different aspects of the bookshelf as we would see in Husserl. It characterizes how the bookshelf itself unfolds over time and space, as a thing which has been and is for the sake of storing books, displaying objects, decorating interiors, etc. In this functional sense, it precedes any analysis and understanding of things in terms of objects. From the viewpoint of Heidegger’s understanding of parthood, then, the difference between moments and pieces, representing the difference between two types of parthood, is parasitic on a preconception of an object or substance as an individual and independent thing; a preconception which tends to neglect the holistic and contextual nature of the being and meaning of a given object. When we consider a visual attribute of an object, like its surface or brightness, as a moment, we risk obscuring a fundamental difference between two types of parthood: the distinction between the composition of objects and the ongoing inner differentiation of the flowing unity of being.

4.3 Dasein’s Wholeness

In what sense, then, is it justified to say that Dasein itself is a whole? This question brings us back to our main focus on Heidegger’s conception of sociality. If Dasein is an independent whole, it seems to follow that Dasein is ontologically prior to its social context as an individual. However, as we have seen in detail, this would contradict Heidegger’s own conception of sociality, as well as raise numerous philosophical difficulties. But if Dasein is not a whole, merely a dependent part, a moment, its abstractness seems to entail a loss of any significant sense of independent individuality, raising severe doubts about the explanatory role of its “mineness” as well as its possibility of authenticity.

Let us continue by evaluating Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s wholeness. In the sixth chapter of division one of Being and Time, Heidegger reaffirms his thesis that being-in-the-world is a complex whole composed of constitutive moments. But “to be sure,” he admits, “the constitution of the structural whole and its everyday kind of being, is phenomenally so manifold (Vielfältigkeit) that it can easily obstruct our looking at the whole as such phenomenologically in a way which is unified” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 180). In other words, though Heidegger has systematically gone through different essential characterizations of Dasein’s being as existence, there still remains the question regarding the nature of the unity of all these moments: “…how is the totality of that structural whole which we have pointed out to be defined in an existential-ontological manner?” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 181). It is not difficult to delineate different aspects of Dasein’s world. But in the end, do all these different aspects, this multiplicity of moments, truly constitute one coherent whole?

Due to the focus of this Element, I will not address every detail of Heidegger’s analysis that serves as a full answer to this question, but will instead pay close attention to the individuation of Dasein against the background of being-with. For Heidegger, the necessary phenomenological starting point for recognizing Dasein as a whole is the state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) of anxiety (Angst). In his words: “Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities. Therefore, with that which it is anxious about, anxiety discloses Dasein as being-possible, and indeed as the only kind of thing which it can be of its own accord as something individualized in individualization (vereinzeltes in der Vereinzelung)” (SZ: 187–188). Anxiety discloses for Dasein its true nature as a factical potentiality, a potentiality-for-being, “an entity which in each case is its possibilities” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 181) into which it finds itself thrown (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 135). Through it we discover the nature of Dasein as one whole of care. The individualization of anxiety is a bringing to awareness of all the possibilities of being which Dasein possesses as a factical being. It is a mood in which one recedes from the usual everyday entanglement in one’s environment and endeavors, gaining an overall perspective of all of one’s involvements as one totality. Involvements articulate the nexus in which things show up as both given and directed. Thus, anxiety individualizes not only in the simple sense that it gathers into one view all the relations that make up Dasein’s being, but mainly in the sense that it discloses Dasein as in essence a thrown projection, a factical potentiality. Thus, the relations which make up Dasein’s being are both potential relations, that is, possibilities of being rather than actual present being, and factical ones, that is, simply ones in which it finds itself.

This dual perspective of anxiety uncovers the subtle sense in which Dasein’s being is being-free for (Freisein für), that is, being fundamentally an openness to a factical possibility, rather than a fulfilment or actualization of a possibility. Actualization is derivative, temporary, and inessential for answering the question who Dasein is. For Heidegger, this further characterizes Dasein’s being as not-being-at-home (Nicht-zuhause-sein), if we take “home” to imply a permanent belonging to something. Dasein’s nature is to never truly belong to any statically present principle, ever only remaining an anticipation which cannot be satisfied, rooted in a basic mood of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). Accordingly, even if Dasein always finds itself in a factical world, the basic structure and being of care is “being-ahead-of-itself” (Sich-vorweg-sein), which is to be constantly and essentially toward one’s own potentiality-for-being, and this means “that in each case Dasein is already ahead of itself in its being. Dasein is always ‘beyond itself’, not as a way of behaving towards other entities which it is not, but as being towards the potentiality-for-being which it is itself” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 191–192). As implied earlier, the realization that Dasein is primarily potentiality means, for Heidegger, that it is “free” from present actuality and thus never a self-identical presence or substance. Indeed, its possibilities are always “given” to it as part of a factical already-existing condition, shaped by history, culture, and circumstances beyond its control. But when Dasein finds itself in this particular situation, always already situated in a world, it encounters the necessity of choosing a possibility. In this sense it is never essentially “at home,” and its prevailing character is that of the uncanny (unheimlich) because it is always not itself, that is, it is always beyond and ahead of itself. As revealed through the experience of anxiety, then, Dasein’s essential being as an existential being is its own self-comportment and its understanding of itself in terms of its comportments, against the background of its unchosen factical circumstances. But as we will see, it is precisely here where the “mereological” problem lies. Does not Dasein’s essential character of being-ahead-of-itself thwart from the outset any possibility of being a whole?

If Dasein is always ahead of itself, there is always something left incomplete and unfulfilled: “The ‘ahead-of-itself’, as a moment in the structure of care, tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding (aussteht), which, as a potentiality-for-being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 236). From this perspective, Dasein is never given as a whole, for as long as it exists, it must “not yet be something” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 233). It is essentially a striving toward something it does not yet possess, self-comportment through and through. And if its basic nature is to comport itself toward something that is not yet achieved or fulfilled, then it seems that, by definition, it always lacks something.Footnote ⁴⁶ As such, it cannot be a whole: “Any entity whose Essence is made up of existence, is essentially opposed to the possibility of our getting it in our grasp as an entity which is a whole” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 233). It seems, then, that Dasein lacks by nature wholeness and unity, and that accordingly the attempt to grasp it as such is futile.

Despite this apparent blind alley, Heidegger argues that the very element which seems to preclude any full grasp of Dasein is, in fact, crucial for constituting the realization and concretization of Dasein as a whole. Surprisingly, it is precisely the unattainable nature of Dasein’s fullness that puts it into view as one whole phenomenon. Such unattainability finds its ultimate expression in death. It is the encounter with death “as the possibility of impossibility,” based on Dasein’s character to be ahead of itself, that constitutes the possibility of grasping Dasein as an independent whole, as a concretum. In other words, Heidegger presents in this context a seemingly paradoxical claim, according to which the impossibility of wholeness is that which constitutes wholeness. To untangle this paradox, we must clarify in what sense the wholeness of which Heidegger speaks does not follow the traditional conception of wholeness as completeness or fulfilment, but rather introduces through the notion of unattainability a different conception of individual wholeness.

It is necessary to first point out that for Heidegger, death is the “disclosedness of the fact that Dasein exists as thrown being towards its end” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 251). It is not the last stage of a process, nor is it its completion, but it is first and foremost the clearest manifestation of the relational being of Dasein as thrown, factical, a potentiality and projection of possibilities into the future.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is primarily an event of disclosure of the structure of the temporal dynamics which Dasein is.Footnote ⁴⁸ Death as an existential is not an endpoint of cessation, but rather a way of being Dasein, “a way to be Dasein in which Dasein is unable to be Dasein” (Blattner, Reference Blattner1994: 49). It is a constant being toward finitude. Death in this sense is an incapability of projecting oneself toward future possibilities. It is a condition in which Dasein is unable to make sense of itself through a projection of some possible way to be. In being toward death, Dasein projects itself toward something it cannot project itself into. In contrast to projecting into possibilities within the scope of Dasein’s realizable world, projecting oneself into death means to anticipate a possibility of no longer being able to anticipate possibilities. When this happens, Dasein experiences itself only in terms of its bare projecting of itself, for it can no longer understand itself in terms of the fulfilment of a possibility of being. When we realize that all our life projects can or will break down before fulfilment, what is left of us, when we try to make sense of ourselves, is only Dasein as a “primordial existential projecting” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 330). As Thomson puts it: “When my being-possible becomes impossible, I still am; my ability-to-be becomes insubstantial, unable to connect to the world, but not inert. My projects collapse, and I no longer have a concrete self I can be, but I still am this inability-to-be” (Reference Thomson and Wrathall2013: 271). When Dasein experiences death, then, this means it is transparent to itself as a finite potentiality that can, by definition, never be actualized. This “not yet” character of Dasein, as Heidegger calls it, is precisely what makes Dasein what it is. However, it should again be emphasized that this incompleteness is not to be understood along the lines of an expected completion of something missing. Such lack of wholeness would describe an incomplete whole composed of pieces, for its occurrent parts would not be altered by the addition of other parts. Like in the case of a partial sum, the components “do not have their kind of Being modified by having the remainder come in” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 242).

Moreover, when Dasein becomes transparent to itself as pure projection, it reaches its necessary limit of being. Such limits put into relief the nature of Dasein’s being, by shedding a contrastive light on who Dasein is through an exclusion of whatever lies beyond its boundaries. To use an example given by Blattner, death is a limit to our ability-to-be, to our projecting, as utter darkness is a limit, a boundary, for sight.Footnote ⁴⁹ It helps define in what this capability of projecting ourselves into the future consists. There is more to the limit-character of death, however, than a mere differentiation between “I” and all that is not “I.” Through existential death, I not only understand what and who I am not, but I also recognize that I in the strict sense am essentially, in a certain sense, not. I am not, in the sense that I am essentially not actual being, but only a factical possibility, a projection, of being. This sense of nonbeing individualizes because it sets Dasein apart from the world of its endeavors and concerns. In this way it tears away Dasein from an unaware absorption in the world that consists in identifying oneself with things and people which it in essence is not. Dasein gains in this way a whole perspective of what it fundamentally is.Footnote ⁵⁰

This point brings us to the proper sense in which Dasein is a whole through the experience of existential death. The way in which being-toward-death enables Dasein to concretize its own self as an independent whole, depends on a function of individualization, as a realization and separation of Dasein from the average understanding of ways of being in the world.Footnote ⁵¹ Such individualization follows the recognition of the limits of every possibility of Dasein’s being and, by drawing such boundaries, makes clear the difference between I and everything that is not I, including others. The fact that I am a primordial existential projection goes hand in hand with the fact of the individuation of such projection. My own death is a possibility that strictly and radically belongs only to me – to my own self. This is precisely why Heidegger determines that in recognizing the conditioned character of all possibilities of being, “anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the anyone-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 266). An important sense of self-wholeness involves a releasement from an unreflected immersion in the possibilities of being prescribed by the Anyone. When Dasein is authentic and concrete, it is in the position to relate any of its possibilities of being to its own possibility of nonbeing. Dasein’s being a whole is, therefore, a certain modality of being, a way of recognizing a constant possibility of not-being which belongs only to me, and as such, enables me to differentiate between my own self, qua anticipation of nonbeing, and others as the Anyone, signifying a lack of any true individualization of a unique singular self. It is this sense of wholeness which ultimately provides a justification for grasping different moments as parts of the same Dasein.

It should be stressed that for Heidegger, the parthood relations of moments in Dasein signify primarily a relationality derived from projection, that is, from potentiality. The relations that constitute Dasein are foremost potential relations, possibilities of being rather than relations between multiple actual, present-at-hand, beings. Dasein is a dynamic unity of moments, but one which is a form of readiness without fulfilment, a form of openness to future possibilities, though upon a factical ground. Our discussion has also ascertained that such openness is nevertheless an individualized openness. Even if Dasein is primordially not actuality but rather factical potentiality, such potentiality is one which is, in some sense, necessarily individualized. We are used to thinking of individualization in terms of the generation of multiple present-at-hand beings. But by bringing into relief the moment-parthood structure of Dasein, Heidegger introduces a different sense of individuation, one which does not necessitate actualization, but rather is always prior as individualized potentiality, and not merely owing to its particular situational circumstances. Contrary to the traditional way of thinking about individuation as a coming into presence of an individuum from potentiality to actuality, in the case of Dasein this order is reversed. The individuum which Dasein is does not emerge as something coming into being through becoming; rather, it is disclosed to be prior to beings as a potentiality-for-being. This disclosure occurs through a neutralization of Dasein’s attachments to actualities, that is, present beings. However, this individuum is not a simple atom, rather a case of a constantly contextualizing movement of projecting possibilities. It remains to demonstrate the further seemingly contradictory claim that though individualized Dasein is indeed a whole composed of moments, at the same time there is a significant sense in which it is itself also a moment.

4.4 Dasein as Whole and Moment

At this stage, it may still appear that authentic Dasein, as concrete and whole, implies cutting off Dasein from others and is therefore a negation of being-with, at least as the social dimension of everyday experience. Heidegger’s own description of existential death as the negation of relations – qua a “non-relational” possibility – appears to support this observation, for example: “The unwavering precision with which Dasein is thus essentially individualized down to its ownmost potentiality-for-being, discloses the anticipation of death as the possibility which is non-relational (unbezüglichen Möglichkeit)” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 307). Death is a possibility that cannot be shared, and if all other possibilities-of-being dissolve in the face of it, this might suggest that authentic Dasein, by acknowledging this necessity rather than ignoring it, loses its ties to others, given that its death is strictly its own. Let us also bear in mind Heidegger’s portrayal of anxiety in terms of solipsism: “Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 188). Dasein in its anxiety does not see itself in terms of fulfillable possibilities in the world – it is “individualized” – and in this sense presumably severed from all other beings. Nevertheless, it is crucial to stress that, in the same breath, Heidegger asserts that the “existential solipsism” of anxiety and the non-relational character of death do not entail radical solitude or a shift toward ontological atomism. As he explicitly tells us:

Though being-toward-death individualizes Dasein, the resulting individuum maintains its constitutive moments of concern and solicitude as its modes of engaging with and comporting itself toward the world. Individualization does not entail a fundamental alteration of Dasein’s ontological-existential constitution. The constitutive moments of Dasein remain unchanged. Since being-with is a constitutive moment of Dasein’s being-in-the-world in general, it also remains constitutive of authentic Dasein. Yet, it is unclear how this holds without contradiction. On the one hand, being-toward-death individualizes Dasein, while on the other, being-with persists as its constitutive moment. How, then, can these seemingly opposing aspects of Heidegger’s account of being-toward-death be reconciled?

To reiterate the issue, we must account for the ontological possibility of being a whole while at the same time maintaining a necessary and essential relation to others as a part. Our primary concern is the feasibility of phenomenologically articulating this relation, given that Heidegger dismisses any attempts to comprehend the structures essential to Dasein with reference to independent wholes, or to pieces that one can simply put together or divide. Since we have established that Heidegger conceptualizes Dasein and fundamental ontology based on the distinction between piece and moment, it is reasonable to anticipate discovering a mereological justification for the ontological structure implied by anxiety and being-toward-death. To explore this ontological possibility, we should return to Husserl’s Third Investigation, as it may provide the proper backdrop for a solution. In §13, Husserl distinguishes between absolute and relative independence (and dependence). He asserts that it is crucial to consider independence and dependence not merely as contradicting opposites but also in a relative sense, where “the absolute distinction then becomes a limiting case of the relative” (Husserl, Reference Husserl and Findlay2001: 22). With this qualification, Husserl aims to articulate cases in which something may be a dependent moment from one viewpoint, yet an independent whole from another perspective:

Parts of a whole W can function as moments of that whole W, but relative to other wholes, such as whole X, they may not play that role. In such cases, these parts are dependent parts of whole W, but independent relative to X. This allows for the possibility of comprehending parts that are moments in an absolute sense as relatively independent wholes. We can regard something as a relatively independent whole, while simultaneously recognizing it is an absolutely abstract moment. I propose understanding Dasein’s authenticity through this conceptual distinction. When Dasein undergoes individualization, the unfolding concretion puts into relief Dasein as an independent whole relative to the dominance of the Anyone in its everyday possibilities of being.Footnote ⁵² When Dasein authentically discloses itself, that is, as it discovers its true being as purely existing, it reveals that in truth it is not who anyone is, that is, it cannot be limited or reduced to the roles, functions, practices, and possibilities which the Anyone determines as available ways of self-understanding. It is therefore concretely independent relative to the collection of the Anyone’s possibilities of being. However, as such, in an absolute sense, Dasein is not a concretum, not an independent whole, for it depends on others as constitutive moments of its being, and itself serves as a moment-part for others. And as demonstrated, it exists as a moment of the unity of being-in-the-world, from which it cannot be separated. Thus, each Dasein interpermeates with others, meaning that, ontologically, there are no genuine personal or private spaces which only subsequently connect through openings or windows, nor should we speak of a “merging” of spheres. There originally exists only one sphere, in which every Dasein necessarily takes part, and relative to which Dasein is dependent. All individual Daseins qua relative individual wholes are accordingly together moments in relations of reciprocal founding-grounding.

But again, this does not mean that from an absolute view Dasein loses its borderlines, so to speak, drifting into an undifferentiated raw mass of prime matter. Pointing to the moments which compose a whole rather than to its pieces does not suggest that the distinctions between these dependent parts are any less essential. On the contrary, the complex whole under discussion precisely consists in unfolding inner differentiations which concretize and highlight an intricate nexus of structural necessities. Accordingly, when Dasein attains authenticity, it means that it individualizes itself only to realize its true constitutive place as a moment in the complex whole of being-with-one-another. As a moment, its borderlines are not diminished but are rather accentuated as a part of inner differentiation, for to be such a moment is to be a constitutive part of the whole in its complexity. Being-toward-death, then, entails the individualization of Dasein relative to Anyone, but at the same time also its realization as a moment in an authentic realization of being-with. Dasein is an individual self only to the extent that it is a moment, an abstractum, of a complex whole. But just as it is not an independent individuum, so it is not a mere derivative of a prior collective unity. Though not isolated, it does not dissolve into a vast expanse of uniformity. While a self exists from within its relations with others, selfhood does not collapse into a mere nodal point in social relationships or contexts. Ontologically, then, though the “I” is a moment of a complex whole, the inner parthood and complexity of that whole are fundamental, rendering the self a basic and irreducible component.

4.5 Individualization and Authentic Being-with

Our analysis thus far has construed Dasein as a moment of a complex, though dynamic, unity, which is itself a relatively independent whole that is composed of moments. In this framework we have attained a conception of a primordial with as an existential, a necessary and constitutive moment of Dasein, that suggests a picture of Dasein as neither absolute individual whole nor mere contingent derivative of a totality in which all differentiations are secondary. This dual aspect of Dasein not only resolves the apparent contradiction between individuality and sociality, but it also sheds further light on the sense in which Dasein can be authentic. Not only does authentic Dasein not give up completely its relating to others in the world, but, as Heidegger also mentions, through being-toward-death Dasein gains a new mode of relating to others:

This passage puts forth a striking claim. The individualization that death as a mode of being brings about entails an “understanding of the potentiality-for-being of others.” Heidegger explains this possibility of understanding others by asserting that being-toward-death, anticipating the possibility of impossibility, not only discloses my own ontological limit, but it also discloses what lies beyond that limit. That is, I gain recognition also of “all the possibilities which lie ahead of that possibility,” and for this reason I can understand myself, and comport myself according to this understanding, as one whole potentiality-for-being. We have already seen that death is a limit-phenomenon analogous to darkness, demarcating the boundaries of Dasein and thus highlighting through contrast what Dasein is as a whole. Thus, it makes sense in this context to interpret the “lying ahead” of possibilities as referring to those possibilities of being that are not mine, lying beyond the sphere of my own possibilities of actualization that lie before the limit of death.Footnote ⁵³ This is not to say that something awaits me after my death in some afterlife, but only that beings lie beyond the limit of my own death in the simple sense that they don’t belong to me, and the projection and fulfillment of their possibilities are ultimately out of my own hands. Furthermore, given that Heidegger mentions these possibilities to illuminate the immediately preceding sentence, according to which existential death leads Dasein toward an “understanding of the potentiality-for-being of others,” one infers that the possibilities in question refer to others as projecting beings. Though the recognition of my own finitude entails a differentiation between me and others, this does not entail isolation. On the contrary, it means that while retreating from an absorption in the possibilities of being that belong to the Anyone and are not my own, I not only reclaim my own possibilities, but also, at least potentially, gain indirect access, through understanding, to others’ authentic possibilities as finite beings.

What the indirect access to others’ authenticity means in this context is a concrete recognition of their own (eigen) unique singular situation. Just as I see myself as an “anyone-self” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 129), so too do others appear to me as mere subjects of average everydayness, anyone-selves, when I exist in this mode. The others are abstract subjects, selves, as anyone is a self. But when Dasein attains authenticity, it shifts from the undifferentiated mode of being-with as the Anyone (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 43), characterized by “an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 170), where both one’s own and others’ individuality remain indifferent (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 121), to a more distinct grasp of itself within the social whole. A crucial aspect of this transformation is the recognition of one’s as well as others’ unique singularity. As Backman aptly notes, in the existential experience of finitude, one opens up a particular form of access to presence, the “instant,” which “discloses the present as unique in the light of Dasein’s own specific possibilities and of the specific factical background that delimits these possibilities. The instant is an openness to a singular present, to one’s singular situation as a singular constellation of meaningfulness” (Backman Reference Backman2015: 92). To give a brief example from everyday life, I may come to see that the particular way I or others engage with music constitutes a unique moment in the unfolding of one’s own Dasein. No one else will ever perceive and interpret in personal song and movement “this” melody in precisely the same way again, as it embodies a singular situation (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 299–301), a mere “glance of the eye” (Augenblick; Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 328) in time. Though the uniqueness of individuals may seem like a trivial observation, truly grasping its full depth through an experience of existential mortality is anything but trivial; rather, it constitutes a moment of an intuition of truth.

One should further note that the indirectness of this recognition of the singularity of others is irreducible. Singularity always entails difference. And since understanding is always bound by thrownness and facticity, our ability not only to recognize others as unique but also to grasp their uniqueness by “putting ourselves in their shoes,” so to speak, largely depends on the degree to which we share common cultural, historical, and social backgrounds. The more closely another’s factical situation aligns with my own, the more readily I can comprehend their possibilities of being and thus recognize them as uniquely who they are as individuals in a concrete way. When we share a factical background, we more evidently appear as interwoven moments within the same social world.Footnote ⁵⁴

Daniel Dahlstrom, presenting the thesis that existential individualization entails existential socialization, similarly interprets this passage as claiming that by projecting death as the most extreme possibility, Dasein exists in an authentic social way.Footnote ⁵⁵ In this mode of being, Dasein exists “with an appreciation of the fact not only that others respectively have this same sort of possibility but also that their possibilities overtake Dasein itself. So construed, existing authentically by anticipating death entails not only solidarity but justice.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Dahlstrom himself admits that deriving concrete social ideals such as solidarity and justice from this passage is speculative, however, there is no doubt that Heidegger puts forth here a contention that runs against the claim that authentic being implies the abolishment of Dasein’s bonds with others. Indeed, being-toward-death reflects an awareness of those factical possibilities which properly belong to others, as well as the sense in which they go beyond my own private possibilities. As we have seen earlier, though individualization entails the differentiation of Dasein from others, at the same time, it does not break down solicitude (Fürsorge), that is, Dasein’s existence for the sake of others, and it even entails a commitment to others as a demand to fully recognize their own unique situation. Individualization – as a concretization of a relative whole who is simultaneously a moment from an absolute perspective – entails a distinct regard for the true singular individuality of others. Disclosing my own singular and “non-relational” character not only provides a new recognition of the self as it truly is – “its own” – but also a new consideration of what – better put, who – others are with respect to their own finitude. If a full understanding of Dasein takes the form of an authentic mode of existence – “a life that reveals what it is to be human in a privileged way” (Guignon, Reference Guignon and McManus2015: 8) – which discloses Dasein not only as a concrete whole but also as an abstract part of the wide world of common experience, then it follows that a proper grasp of oneself as one’s own (Eigentlichkeit) does not end within the confines of what we would demarcate as the strictly private sphere of untethered individuality.

4.6 Authentic Solicitude

The claim that authenticity involves an understanding of others’ capacity for authentic being resonates in Heidegger’s description of the mode of Dasein’s disclosedness through resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), in a way which implies not only the intuition of others’ finitude but also a prescription for a particular mode of social interaction. Resoluteness is an openness and readiness for anxiety and being-toward-death.Footnote ⁵⁷ But again, we see that Heidegger insists that it does not entail a solitary retreat from others or a cancellation of being-with: “Resoluteness, as authentic being-one’s-self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I.’ And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the self right into its current concernful being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous being with others” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 298). Dasein’s authenticity does not lead to isolation; rather, as we’ve seen, it recognizes others’ situational uniqueness in their relationality and parthood. In this statement, however, Heidegger seems to make the further claim that with the appreciation of others’ finitude comes a certain practical engagement with others. Resoluteness drives – “pushes” – Dasein into contact with others. And not just contact in general, but an authentic form of solicitude, one that “lets the others who are with it ‘be’ in their ownmost potentiality-for-being, and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 298). To better understand the nature of this authentic mode of solicitude, we must go back to earlier passages in Being and Time that raise it as a possibility, in the context of an analysis of being-with.

In the fourth chapter of division one of Being and Time, Heidegger defines solicitude – Fürsorge – as “a being towards entities encountered within-the-world” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 121) that themselves have the existential mode of being of Dasein. “Being for, against, or without one another, passing one another by, not ‘mattering’ to one another – these are possible ways of solicitude” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 121). Heidegger distinguishes it from concern – Besorgen – which is aimed at ready-to-hand objects, as our way of handling things in order to fulfill some purpose. Solicitude, like concern, is a term that signifies for Heidegger an existentiale. Heidegger portrays solicitude as having “two extreme possibilities”: on the one hand, one can “take away ‘care’ from the Other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in for him” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 122). In this mode of being for another, one puts oneself in the place of the other and takes over the other’s concerns for them. Thus, the other steps back to allow the one who puts themselves in the other’s place to perform the necessary activities pertaining to the other’s concerns. Then, on this basis, the other can once more gain control of the matter after it has been finished, that is, after the deed the other can bring it again into their disposal; or the other can choose to completely forgo the matter and disburden themselves of it. On the other hand, there is an opposing kind of solicitude which rather than leaping in for the other, leaps ahead of him (ihm vorausspringt) not

In this mode of solicitude, one does not take the other’s place to concern oneself with ready-to-hand things which were previously the other’s, but rather one is genuinely with the other in their concerns, aiding the other in the effort to become authentic, that is, to be one’s own in their concerns; to rise as a true self over against the others.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is this authentic way of being for the sake of others toward which, according to Heidegger, resoluteness frees and directs us. A state of sharing a common awareness of finitude and vulnerability: I do not attempt to relieve the other from anxiety in the face of their own limited being, but I rather acknowledge their potential distress and attempt to attune myself to it, so as to simply be there with them in their own situation.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is important to emphasize that authentic solicitude is neither a condition for recognizing others as Dasein,Footnote ⁶⁰ nor does it necessarily entail ethical claims.Footnote ⁶¹ When Dasein comports itself toward others either authentically or inauthentically, a necessary presupposition for both of these possibilities is that Dasein already shares a world with others, and already understands these others to be Dasein as well. At stake, then, is not an account of the possibility of recognizing others as such, but rather the social dimensions of authenticity. The recognition of one’s own finitude as a moment of a whole entails the recognition of others along similar lines, and this in turn opens up a range of proper action informed by this insight.Footnote ⁶²

Early commentators, in accordance with the “solipsistic” understanding of Dasein’s authenticity, view authentic solicitude as parasitic on a prior state of individual authenticity. Theunissen, for example, thinks that authentic being-with-one-another is at best secondary, because recognizing others’ individuality requires as a necessary condition that I first recognize my own finitude. Furthermore, being attentive to the finitude of someone else means recognizing that aspect about them to which they alone have access. As Theunissen claims, the non-relational character of being toward death frees Dasein “for an awareness of the most alien aspect of the alien – as the ownmost of the Other” (Reference Theunissen and McCann1984: 190). Authentic solicitude’s character of “letting others be,” according to Theunissen, signifies the recognition of others’ own possibilities of being, but at the same time also the dissolution of all direct contact with them: “Others can be freed for themselves inasmuch as they are freed from me” (Reference Theunissen and McCann1984: 191). It might indeed seem, then, that the recognition of others’ autonomy constitutes simultaneously a necessary distance between others and I. If this were a complete portrayal of authentic solicitude, then it would not be different from inauthentic solicitude in that both abstain from direct contact with the other as a genuine thou.Footnote ⁶³ There seems to be lacking, in other words, the minimal degree of intimacy required for seeing the other from a second-person perspective, based on a personal recognition of their own individual agency. It might be, then, that for Heidegger others always constitute the third person, and the second person should be understood simply as derivative of it. This interpretation apparently coheres with Heidegger’s rejection of empathy as a foundation of sociality, not to mention that Heidegger explicitly states that “the with-one-another cannot be explained through the I-Thou relation or in terms of it but rather the reverse” (Reference Saame, Saame–Speidel and McNeillGA27: 145).

However, although Heidegger does not view second-person experiences of other Dasein who stand before me as the constitutive or foundational sense of sociality, this does not imply that such dyadic relations are not genuine. Admittedly, he does not provide a fully developed concrete account of I-Thou relations, yet he offers an account of the genuine recognition of another individual Dasein, not as the Anyone, but as another unique and singular self. In response to solipsistic interpretations, we must bear in mind that Dasein’s individualization through anxiety does not entail an absolute retreat from others. Rather, it involves taking over one’s own possibilities of being – continuing to essentially imply sociality – from the hands of the normative dictations of the Anyone. Though another’s death is inherently beyond my grasp, this does not entail seclusion, but rather a mutual process of individuation. As I recognize my ownmost possibility, I realize that others similarly possess their ownmost possibility, and this clears the way for genuine recognition of another as a singular self who is called “forth into the Situation” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 301) as I am, “in order to be more authentically ‘there’ in the ‘moment of vision’ as regards the Situation which has been disclosed” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 328). One recognizes and appreciates what is truly the others’ own: their own situational and factical possibility of authenticity. It would therefore be imprecise and misleading to simply dismiss authentic solicitude as indirect or derivative. Even if it takes place upon an everyday public ground, it appears as a concretization of the social sphere that enables me to see you precisely as you authentically are as a genuine individual.

Furthermore, critics such as Theunissen tend to view authentic solicitude still under the influence of the phenomenological paradigm of empathy, where one begins the inquiry from the first-person pole of an ego. From such a perspective, solicitude may indeed seem like a second-order relation between individuals. As we have seen, however, though Dasein possesses mineness, to properly understand such mineness, one must grasp it as a moment of a social whole, and not as an indicator of an independent ego. In this picture the independent self is decentralized – though not completely brushed aside – as an explanatory principle. When one explains the move from inauthenticity to authenticity, as I have shown, one should not search for a disruption in the social dimensions of experience. Instead, we should look for a modal shift in the grasp of sociality, which from its outset includes new possibilities of interaction and authentic understanding of the other. As mentioned earlier, a wider perspective on the individualization of Dasein reveals a shift from an undifferentiated understanding of being-with (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 43), “an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 170), in which one is indifferent to others’ as well as one’s own individuality (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 121), to a differentiated grasp of the social whole, which implies a genuine concern for the individuality of others and myself as moments of a differentiated complex whole. Authentic solicitude unfolds based on, or alongside, this insight. In terms of action for the sake of others, authentic Dasein does not take away the other’s possibilities by acting in a paternalistic manner, thinking or doing things for them, but rather recognizes and respects these possibilities as genuinely belonging to the other in their uniqueness. A true concern for what another Dasein is, is a concern for their own being as singular thrown projection, involving a certain form of care for their own selfhood as factical projecting beings. This form of solicitude guides the other toward developing their own authentic relationship to the world. It means helping the other be who they can be as their own. And again, being one’s own implies being in the world with others.Footnote ⁶⁴

This point leads us to another essential characteristic of authentic solicitude: a common devotion for the same affair. When one considers Dasein not from an I-Thou perspective, but rather from a plural perspective of togetherness, one sees that authentic solicitude also concerns the common ground shared by all members of a group. If this common ground is to be genuine, it cannot remain merely factical. While discussing its general characteristics, Heidegger continues to explain what ultimately grounds solicitude, in both its inauthentic and authentic modes:

It is not so much about doing the same thing, then, but rather about being comported towards the same thing. When people together

Heidegger portrays being-with-one-another as a range of possibilities of being with others, determined by a common matter (or lack thereof). We always understand ourselves in relation to some form of being together with others, and this togetherness that characterizes our self-understanding in relation to others ranges from deficient forms of sociality such as alienation and mistrust, deriving from a lack of common ground or object, to a genuine sharing of a common matter. We are always situated in a certain mode of sharing the world with others, and only within this horizon things are there for us. On this basis, the degree of solicitude’s authenticity is defined not only by its way of regarding others but also by the sense in which Dasein and others share something in a common comportment to the same object of concern, bound by a shared facticity. We have already seen earlier that sharing, in the sense of a common “letting be” of the world, a sharing of unconcealment, is the fundamental aspect of being-with. In the domain of solicitude, sharing has a narrower scope, taking on various concrete modes which can be either authentic or inauthentic, depending not only on the extent to which they exemplify first-person and second-person relationality which is for the sake of others in the “proper” sense delineated earlier, but also insofar as one can discern a shared ultimate end that unites all parties involved. While Heidegger does not provide a detailed phenomenology of different subdomains and scales of sociality, we can infer that this analysis applies both to small-scale groups such as neighborhoods and professional organizations, and large-scale ones, such as cultures and states. Every concrete form of social organization can be assessed against these criteria of social authenticity. Communal life at large, however, poses its own further set of questions.

4.7 Fate and Destiny: Historical Community

For communal sharing to be concrete, it must constitute a sphere of common meaning, ends, and possibilities, which ultimately presupposes sharing an openness to our own finitude. Ultimately, a shared horizon of possibilities mediated by a mutual recognition of finitude implies a community with a historical consciousness, that is, a community comprising members who are aware of their historical origins and look into the future with full recognition of their own individual finitude as well as the finitude of their community.Footnote ⁶⁵ Heidegger gives us a glimpse at what such historical consciousness would require in section 74 of Being and Time, when he briefly discusses what he terms “authentic historizing.” Historizing is a resoluteness that involves an awareness of one’s situatedness in time and place, in the sense of being born to a given society, culture, or people. As resolute, Dasein projects itself upon its own groundlessness disclosed by the possibility of its death, while at the same time realizing that its various possibilities of being Dasein, as vast as they may seem, are handed down to it. Thus, historizing occurs when Dasein as resolute takes over its own heritage (Erbe) (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 383). When Dasein historizes and chooses a possibility of being resolutely, it understands itself as a member of a historical community, and decides who it is in light of its significant past. Though Heidegger refers to historical choice and action with the phrase repetition (Wiederholung), his notion of heritage does not imply a blind reproduction of the same or a strict orthodoxy that stifles novelty. Instead, it involves appropriating general models of what it means to be a child of one’s culture and concretizing them in everyday experience in an inevitably new way. “In one’s coming back resolutely to one’s thrownness, there is hidden a handing down to oneself of the possibilities that have come down to one, but not necessarily as having thus come down” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 383). An authentic tradition does not hand down to Dasein customs and mores which it must blindly accept and repeat simply because they have been handed down. Rather, in authentic community it is Dasein itself who hands down to itself its own tradition and thus reaffirms it as its own, “free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 384). For Heidegger, it is this phenomenon of appropriating and reinterpreting one’s heritage which is one’s fate (Schicksal). This word captures the determinacy of Dasein’s place in time as thrown, while underlining that its historical situation is nevertheless not a fatalistic, but rather a chosen, result. Fate is an achievement one gains in recognizing one’s own finitude, choosing to act as situated.

Based on this understanding of individual fate, Heidegger refers to the historizing of a community or a people (Volk) at large as destiny (Geschick) (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 384), again in a non-fatalistic reinterpretation of the term. Though destiny is understood in terms of “co-historizing,” and thus as a coming together of the fates of all members of the community, it is not simply an aggregate of fates. “Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 384). Unsurprisingly, the destiny of a community is not a whole comprising various pieces in the form of the different fates of its members. It should be rather understood as an open-ended whole made up of moments. The meaning and significance of each and every individual fate cannot be separated from other fates, and is likewise inseparable in terms of its sense from the wider destiny of its community: “Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating (Mitteilung) and in struggling (Kampf) does the power of destiny become free” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 384). Every individual is bound up with the fate of other individuals as well as with the general course of events which determine reality. Of course, Dasein is thrown into a given context which constrains its possibilities of being, yet destiny involves more than mere facticity or thrownness. It is the appropriation of a community’s past and projection of its future on a large scale. This grand projection occurs through “communication” and “struggle.”

Earlier in Being and Time Heidegger defines communication as “letting someone see with us what we have pointed out by way of giving it a definite character. That which is ‘shared’ is our Being towards what has been pointed out – a Being in which we see it in common” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 155). This reverberates the general insight of this Element. To communicate we must first share a world, and communication allows us to be toward the same thing, to share it in an explicit manner, and thus to be together in a genuine way. However, by reading the German word for communication – Mit-teilung – literally as a sharing-with, we can uncover further the idea that destiny is more than a collection of individual fates and thus more than a mere intersubjective communication of decisions regarding one’s personal fate. As Richard Polt puts it: “My world is shared: the network constantly implies others, even if they are not currently on the scene. My habits are cultural, my language is dialogical, the traditions to which I am indebted were developed by others. To grapple with my own existence is, at the same time, to address what it means to be a member of a community” (Reference Polt2019: 44). As a unity of genuine being-with that cannot be reduced to a mere aggregate of individuals, destiny constitutes a unitary whole that affects the character of its parts.

With respect to struggle, Heidegger does not provide in this context an exact definition of what the term means exactly.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, in the ensuing paragraphs, Heidegger does say that “it is in resoluteness that one first chooses the choice which makes one free for the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps of that which can be repeated” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 385). Thus, one can infer that “struggle” refers to the toil of repetition in the sense of appropriation and reinterpretation which straddles the line between lifeless blind recurrence of the same norms of the Anyone and an aloof attempt at ex nihilo creativity. There is a struggle between continuity and discontinuity, between the tradition and one’s own freedom to choose. Does this imply a struggle between fate and destiny? Admittedly, we are left without a clear answer regarding the fundamental relationship between fate and destiny. Is the unity – the historical whole – simply prior to the individual fates whose thrown possibilities of being it shapes? Does this view undermine the idea of individual freedom? Are we witnessing the seeds of a fatal social determinism?

In Being and Time, the tension between fate and destiny reflects a general tension between individuality and collectivity. In this period of Heidegger’s thought, the conflict is not resolved by prioritizing one over the other. Rather, it is upheld as an essential tension, a difference within sameness. As we have established repeatedly throughout this study, Dasein is at once a relative whole and an absolute moment. Heidegger’s conception of authentic sociality implies an individualistic aspect – a mutual recognition of others’ difference and individuality – as well as a communal aspect – a shared belonging to the same horizon. Heidegger portrays a picture of community as difference in sameness, a holistic understanding of selfhood which does not neglect the significance of the inner differentiation of the communal whole. However, though we perceive in the relations between fate and destiny the duality of selfhood as both mereologically dependent and independent, it cannot be denied that this framework is utterly formal, leaving the concrete content of individual–community relations woefully underdetermined.

4.8 Social Plurality as the Interplay of Part and Whole

At any rate, we should clearly differentiate between being-with as a fundamental dimension of experience and authentic solicitude as a particular possibility of communal life. The latter fulfills a particular ontic existentiell possibility, based on an existential ontological condition of Dasein. For Heidegger of Being and Time, the foundational with of sociality does not point to a particular political project, not to mention that its descriptions of an authentic communal existence leave the question of the concrete relations between the individual and the community open. One could argue that this unresolved problem continues into the thirties with the question “who are we?”Footnote ⁶⁷ But this goes beyond the scope of this study. Regardless of how we judge the political aspects of Heidegger’s thought and its relations to the rest of his work, we cannot ignore the fact that in this period Heidegger puts forth a radically new understanding of the ontology of the social aspects of being human, on the basis of a new understanding of part-whole relations. This social ontological framework does not necessarily endorse any particular political ideology, but it undeniably seeks to revolutionize our understanding of subjectivity, selfhood, and the role of relations to others in the fundamental constitution of who we are.

In closing, let us stress that we cannot conceive of the self as an isolated individuum, nor merely as a moment within a social context, reducible to a unit of a collection. Such an objectifying perspective on sociality contradicts the true nature of the dynamic unfolding of the phenomena that constitute the self and its world. In fact, Heidegger speaks of two different ways of understanding social plurality: Being-there-too (Auch-da-sein) that characterizes how many Daseins are primordially together, and Being-present-at-hand-along-‘with’ (‘Mit’-Vorhandensein) that characterizes collections of present-at-hand beings. In the latter kind of plurality, many beings are present together indifferently, without any involvement in each other’s being, apart from the sole fact of their presence alongside one another. They are no more than pieces of a composite whole. On the other hand, in the former kind of plurality, numerous Daseins are constitutive of each other, that is, “too” implies an essential bond between interdependent moments. It is in this sense of plurality that “the world is always the one that I share with Others,” and that “the world of Dasein is a with-world” (Reference Macquarrie, Robinson and StambaughSZ: 155). Heidegger challenges us to think of being part of a social world in dynamic terms of ever-unfolding relations between us, others, and the open-ended whole which constantly serves as a background for our everyday endeavors. Heidegger’s dynamic understanding of parthood uncovers a tension between individuality and communality, an ongoing interplay of dependent part and open-ended whole. In its most primordial form, this interplay of parts and whole – a unity of interdependent and interpenetrating moments – is the ground of our shared world. On this foundation, the ideal of authentic sociality takes the general form of individual difference within shared sameness, as a community whose members are aware of their own as well as others’ fundamental being as projection – a potentiality which precedes actuality – while holding together common finite historical horizons of past and future.