HEIDEGGER’S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY

Many critics and commentators hold that Heidegger had next to

nothing to say about human sociality. In this book, Nicolai Knudsen
rectifies this popular misconception. Drawing on his influential
philosophy of mind, his philosophy of action, and his conception
of being-with, Knudsen argues that the central idea of Heidegger’s
social ontology is that we can only understand others, do things with
others, and form lasting groups with others if we pre-reflectively
correlate their behaviour with our own projects and the world that
lies between us. Knudsen then uses this framework to formulate
Heideggerian contributions to current debates on social cognition,
collective intentionality, and social normativity. He also reinterprets
Heidegger’s famous concept of authenticity in the light of his social
ontological commitments and shows how Heidegger’s affiliation with
National Socialism betrays his own best insights into the fundamen-
tal structure of social life.

 .  is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at

Aarhus University. He has published articles in European Journal of
Philosophy, Research in Phenomenology, and Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences.
   
Titles published in the series
Henry Somers-Hall: Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy
Sacha Golob: Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity
Ludwig Siep: Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”
Jeanine Grenberg: Kant’s Defense of Common Moral Experience
Fabian Freyenhagen: Adorno’s Practical Philosophy
Brady Bowman: Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity
Robert Stern: Understanding Moral Obligation
Espen Hammer: Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory
David James: Fichte’s Social and Political Philosophy
Anne Margaret Baxley: Kant’s Theory of Virtue
Benjamin Rutter: Hegel on the Modern Arts
Nicolas D. Warren: Husserl and the Promise of Time
Sharon Krishek: Kierkegaard on Faith and Love
Jean-Christophe Merle: German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment
Kristin Gjesdal: Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism
Paul Redding: Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought
Andrew Bowie: Music, Philosophy and Modernity
Rachel Zuckert: Kant on Beauty and Biology
Béatrice Longuenesse: Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics
Otfried Höffe: Kant’s Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace
Heinrich Meier: Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem
Wayne Martin: Theories of Judgment
Béatrice Longuenesse: Kant on the Human Standpoint
Johanna Oksala: Foucault on Freedom
Robert M. Wallace: Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God
Wolfgang Detel: Foucault and Classical Antiquity
Michael Quante: Hegel’s Concept of Action
Jon Stewart: Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered
Rüdiger Bubner: The Innovations of Idealism
Douglas Moggach: The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer
Taylor Carman: Heidegger’s Analytic
Will Dudley: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy
J. M. Bernstein: Adorno
Allen Speight: Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency
Henry Allison: Kant’s Theory of Taste
Michelle Grier: Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion
Daniel Dahlstrom: Heidegger’s Concept of Truth
Nicholas Wolsterstorff: Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology
Cristina Lafont: Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure
Alfredo Ferrarin: Hegel and Aristotle
Karl Ameriks: Kant and the Fate of Autonomy
Allen Wood: Kant’s Ethical Thought
Gary Gutting: Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity
 Charles Griswold: Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment
William Blattner: Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism
Warren Breckman: Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory
Günter Zöller: Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy
Frederick A. Olafson: Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics
HEIDEGGER’S SOCIAL
ONTOLOGY
The Phenomenology of Self, World, and Others

NICOLAI K. KNUDSEN
Aarhus University
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: Heidegger’s social ontology : the phenomenology of self, world and others / Nicolai Knudsen.
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My suggestion is merely that the problem of the relationship of
human being to human being does not concern a question of
epistemology or the question of how one human being
comprehends another. It concerns rather a problem of being itself,
that is, a problem of metaphysics.
Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

Heaven and earth and gods and men are held together by
communion and friendship, by orderliness, temperance, and
justice; and that is the reason, my friend, why they call the whole
of this world by the name of order, not of disorder
or dissoluteness.
Plato, Gorgias
 Contents

Acknowledgements page xi
List of Abbreviations of Works by Heidegger xiii

Introduction 

  ---  -

 What Is Social Ontology? 
. Scope and Method 
. Fundamental Ontology and Social Ontology 
. Domains and Dimensions 
. Sociality De Facto, Sociality De Jure 

 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 

. Husserl’s Paths to Intersubjectivity 
. From Transcendental Subjectivity to Existential Selfhood 
. Transcendence, Facticity, and Individuation 
. The Transcendental Status of Being-With 

 Holism and Relativism 

. Two Interpretations of Heidegger’s Holism 
. Object-Awareness and Relativism 
. Holism, Triangulation, and the Role of Language 
. With Whom Do We Share the World? 

    -

 Interpersonal Understanding 
. Theories of Social Cognition 
. Heidegger’s Critique of Social Cognition 
. Transpositioning 
. Interlude on the Ethics of Solicitude 
. The Problem of Nonhuman Animals 

ix
x Contents
 Shared Action 
. An Outline of Shared Action 
. Pre-Reflective and Reflective Action 
. Joint Goals and Joint Commitments 
. A Taxonomy of Individual and Shared Actions 
. Discourse 
. Variations of the We 

 Two Types of Social Normativity 

. Anonymous Social Normativity: The Anyone 
. Historical Social Normativity: Community and People 
. Is Community Necessary? 

    

 Heidegger’s Politics 
. Community, State, and Education 
. Metapolitics and the History of Being 
. The Jews and the Germans 
. Heidegger’s Mistakes 

 The Demand for Authenticity 

. What Is Authenticity? Some Preliminary Remarks 
. Being-Towards-Death and the Constancy of the Self 
. Conscience and Attributability 
. Authenticity and Being-With 

Conclusion 

Bibliography 
Index 
 Acknowledgements

Many people have been helpful to me in the process of writing this book.
I am particularly thankful to Thomas Schwarz Wentzer for his guidance
and mentorship over the years. I would also like to thank Mark Wrathall
for his support and for our walks in the meadow. I am generally grateful to
the friends and colleagues with whom I have discussed ideas and material
related to the book. These include Lars Albinus, Anders Moe Rasmussen,
Katherine Withy, Hans Ruin, Dan Zahavi, Rasmus Dyring, and several
generations of the research group on philosophical hermeneutics at Aarhus
University. I am also in debt to audiences, both real and virtual, in Aarhus,
Ljubljana, Ontario, Oxford, Roskilde, San Diego, and Staffordshire for
discussing Heidegger’s social ontology with me.
My work has been facilitated by generous funding from the Carlsberg
Foundation, by a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford’s Linacre College,
and, prior to that, by a research stipend at Aarhus University. At
Cambridge University Press, I thank my editor, Hilary Gaskin, for making
what I imagined would be a gruelling process (more or less) enjoyable, as
well as the anonymous peer reviewers, whose comments have improved
the book considerably.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the support (espe-
cially all the help with the kids!) and love of my family – my mom and her
partner, Annette and Gert; my wife’s parents, Søren and Birgitte; and my
brothers, Steffen and Joachim. I owe, however, the greatest gratitude to my
wife, Anne Sofie, for being my best friend and for loving me even when
I am stressed out about work and parenting, and to my sons, Bille and
Aske, for helping me find the balance between work and play. I dedicate
this book to the three of you.

xi
xii Acknowledgements
Section . provides a heavily condensed version of an argument that
first appeared as ‘Heidegger and the Genesis of Social Ontology: Mitwelt,
Mitsein, and the Problem of Other People’ in European Journal of
Philosophy : (), pp. –, published by Wiley.
A shortened and adjusted version of Chapter  appears as ‘Shared
Action: An Existential Phenomenological Account’ in Phenomenology and
the Cognitive Sciences (), advance online publication. published
by Springer.
 Abbreviations of Works by Heidegger

I mostly refer to Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (GA), except for Being and

Time (SZ) where I use the edition published by Max Niemeyer Verlag. In
the text, the German pagination is given first, followed by the English
pagination when I have consulted a translation. I have modified the
translations as I deemed necessary.
GA Holzwege. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Translated as Off the Beaten Track by J. Young and
K. Haynes. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
GA Vorträge und Aufsätze. . Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann. ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ is translated as
‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays by W. Lovitt. .
New York and London: Garland Publishing
GA Wegmarken. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Translated as Pathmarks. . Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
GA Unterwegs zur Sprache. . Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann. Partly translated as On the Way to Language by
P. D. Hertz. . New York: Harper & Row. ‘Die Sprache’,
GA, –, is translated as ‘Language’ in Poetry, Language,
Thought by A. Hofstadter. . New York: Harper & Row
GA Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. . Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann. ‘Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen
Universität’ is translated as ‘The Self-Assertion of the German
University’ by W. Lewis in R. Wolin, ed., The Heidegger
Controversy. . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

xiii
xiv List of Abbreviations
GA Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. . Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann. Translated as Basic Concepts of
Aristotelian Philosophy by R. D. Metcalf and M. B.
Tanzer. . Bloomington: Indiana University Press
GA Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. . Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann. Translated as History of the Concept of
Time: Prolegomena by T. Kisiel. . Bloomington: Indiana
University Press
GA Die Grundbegriffe der Phänomenologie. . Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann. Translated as The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology by A. Hofstadter. . Bloomington: Indiana
University Press
GA Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von
Leibniz. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Translated
as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic by M. Helm. .
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
GA Einleitung in die Philosophie. . Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann
GA/ Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit –
 Einsamkeit. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Translated as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:
World, Finitude, Solitude by W. McNeil and
N. Walker. . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
GA/ Sein und Wahrheit. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
 Translated as Being and Truth by G. Fried and R. Polt. .
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
GA Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache. .
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Translated as Logic as the
Question Concerning the Essence of Language by W. T. Gregory
and Y. Unna. . Albany, NY: SUNY Press
GAA Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache. .
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann
GA Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’. .
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Translated as Hölderlin’s
Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ by W. McNeill and
J. Ireland. . Bloomington: Indiana University Press
GA Einführung in die Metaphysik. . Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann. Translated as Introduction to Metaphysics by
G. Fried and R. Polt. . New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press
 List of Abbreviations xv
GA Hölderlin’s Hymne ‘Andenken’. . Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann
GA Hölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’. . Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann. Translated as Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ by
W. McNeill and J. Davis. . Bloomington: Indiana
University Press
GA Parmenides. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Translated as Parmenides by A. Schuwer and
R. Rojcewicz. . Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press
GA/ Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. . Frankfurt am Main:
 Klostermann. Translated as Towards the Definition of
Philosophy by T. Sadler. . London and New York:
Continuum
GA Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. . Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann
GA Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. . Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann. Translated as The Phenomenology of
Religious Life by M. Fritsch and J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei. .
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
GA Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität. . Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann. Translated as Ontology – The
Hermeneutics of Facticity by J. van Buren. . Bloomington:
Indiana University Press
GA Der Begriff der Zeit. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Translated as The Concept of Time by I. Farin and
A. Skinner. . New York and London: Continuum
GA Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). . Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann. Translated as Contributions to Philosophy
(From Enowning) by P. Emad and K. Maly. .
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
GA Seminare: Hegel – Schelling. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann. Partly translated as On Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right: The – Seminar and Interpretive Essays by
A. Mitchell. . New York: Bloomsbury
GA Zollikoner Seminare. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Translated as Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations –
Letters by F. Mayr and R. Askay. . Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press
xvi List of Abbreviations
GA Überlegungen II–VI. . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Translated as Ponderings II–VI by R. Rojcewicz. .
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
GA Überlegungen VII–XI. . Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann. Translated as Ponderings VII–XI by
R. Rojcewicz. . Bloomington: Indiana University Press
GA Überlegungen XII–XV. . Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann. Translated as Ponderings XII–XV by
R. Rojcewicz. . Bloomington: Indiana University Press
NHS Nature, History, State: –. Translated by G. Fried and
R. Polt. . New York: Bloomsbury
SZ Sein und Zeit. . Tübingen: Niemeyer. Translated as
Being and Time by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. .
Oxford: Blackwell
 Introduction

While his analysis of human existence is celebrated as a work of genius, it is

accepted as a truism that Martin Heidegger was philosophically ignorant
when it came to human coexistence. Critics claim that the ontology of
Dasein is monological and solipsistic (Buber ; Habermas , ;
Theunissen ), that it can be of absolutely no use in explaining what
happens when we encounter another human being (Sartre , ), and
that it fundamentally misconstrues intersubjectivity by subordinating our
relationship with the other to our relationship to ourselves (Levinas ,
). Even philosophers who are otherwise quite sympathetic to
Heidegger’s work seem to agree. For example, Hans-Georg Gadamer once
remarked that Heidegger’s claim that Dasein’s being is always a being-with
was ‘a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got
behind’ (Gadamer & Dottori , ).
In this book, I intend to rectify this popular misconception and show
that Heidegger not only had a social ontology but also a social ontology of
lasting value. My ambition is hence twofold. On the one hand, I wish to
develop and defend a novel interpretation of Heidegger’s texts that high-
lights the centrality of being-with for his philosophy of being, the centrality
of social ontology for fundamental ontology. On the other hand, I wish to
contribute to contemporary social ontology by using Heidegger’s phenom-
enology to shed new light on how human beings understand each other,
do things with each other, and form groups with each other.
The central idea is that Heidegger’s famous analysis of the human mind
and human agency in terms of being-in-the-world harbours within itself a
promising but overlooked social ontology. I intend to show that
Heidegger’s fundamental ontology provides a sophisticated, holistic phi-
losophy of mind according to which our distinctively human capacities
necessarily depend on our relations to other people. I then argue that once
we have identified and conceptualised this general holism, we are better
equipped to analyse particular social phenomena such as interpersonal

 Introduction
understanding, shared action, and social normativity. The key to under-
standing these phenomena is, according to Heidegger, to see them as
different types of practical and affective interaction in an inherently
shared world.

. Minds and Other Minds

Although he would be highly suspicious of the term, we might nonetheless
say that Heidegger advocates a distinct philosophy of mind. More specifi-
cally, he endorses what we today recognise as a form of externalism
according to which all our distinctively human capacities – our capacities
for communicating, acting, and understanding – constitutively depend on
our relations to the world. The features of this externalism emerge clearly
if we contrast it with the traditional Cartesian internalism. According to
Cartesianism, our distinctively human capacities do not constitutively
depend on our relations to the world as these are, in principle, available
to the mind even if the world turns out to be a mere illusion. This view is
supported by the assumption – summarised in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum –
that to be a mind is to be capable of introspection. Introspection is non-
observational and non-inferential; it is the internal examination of one’s
own thoughts and mental processes. The capacity for introspection is,
accordingly, a relation of the individual mind to itself. In this way, it
remains radically independent not only of worldly but also social affairs.
Cartesian internalism, therefore, comes with an in-built atomism.
Heidegger, on the contrary, takes the capacity for affective and practical
engagement to be the defining feature of the mind. When I use a hammer,
I do not think about what I am doing in any explicit or deliberate way.
Instead, I pre-reflectively adjust the angle and the force of the hammer so
that it fits with the particular hammer, the particular nail, and the
particular surface that I try to drive the nail into. Rather than thinking,
I simply respond to the solicitations of the environment in which I act.
Heidegger argues that a sense of self is reflected back to us from these
worldly solicitations, that in my dealing with the hammer, I get to
understand myself as the one for whom hammering is significant
(GA, /). This sense of self is non-inferential and as immediate
as my practical engagement with the hammer. But pace Cartesian


Chapter  discusses why Heidegger would be suspicious of the concept of the mind and of the
internalist/externalist-distinction as well as why and in which sense we might nevertheless use these
concepts to understand his position.
 Introduction 
introspection, this type of self-awareness is not seen as something radically
private, as the mind’s relation to itself. The mind – or Dasein as we should
call it to avoid some unfortunate internalist associations – is defined by its
relation to the world. Dasein is, as Heidegger says, being-in-the-world.
The term Dasein refers to ‘the entities that, in their being, comport
themselves towards their being’ (SZ, /). Heidegger expands upon this
characteristic by noting that Dasein ‘is in each case essentially its own
possibility’ (SZ, /). This means that Dasein always faces a field of
possibilities towards which it can never be totally indifferent. It has to
navigate these possibilities (should I do this or that?) and the way in which
it navigates these possibilities will come to define what or who it is
(am I this or that?). Our conception of who we are is always at stake in
and gives purpose to our way of responding to the possibilities offered to us
by our social and physical environment. As a first approximation, we might
think of Dasein as the entity that purposefully responds to solicitations.
Importantly, solicitations are not independent of worldly affairs, nor are
they, we might conjecture, independent of social affairs. A solicitation
depends, as we will see, on a complex network or whole of relations
between human and nonhuman entities, between ourselves, the environ-
ment, and other people. If this is correct, Heidegger’s externalism does not
simply say that a subject is inconceivable without an object, but states,
more radically, that Dasein is inconceivable without a system of relations


The concept of Dasein is notoriously difficult to pin down, and scholars disagree whether the term
Dasein refers to individual human beings or to some kind of collective. The majority argues that
Dasein is a term for ‘concrete human particulars, that is, individual persons’ (Carman , ) and
that ‘sociality is treated of only as a feature of individual life’ (Schatzki , ). In contrast, John
Haugeland has argued that ‘[D]asein is a way of living that embodies an understanding of being’
(Haugeland , f ). A way of living is, he argues, irreducible to individual human beings,
although it only exists by virtue of the individuals that embody it. For this reason, Haugeland uses
the expression ‘case of dasein’ as a term for individual people (Haugeland , ).
Haugeland’s collectivist interpretation of Dasein is, however, textually implausible. Heidegger
says, for instance, that one must always use a personal pronoun when addressing Dasein (SZ, /,
cf. Carman , ). Pace Haugeland, we do not do this when we talk about a general way of living.
Carman rightly points out that the passage in SZ mentions singular personal pronouns (I and you)
and takes this to support his individualist reading. Yet, Carman does not discuss similar passages
where Heidegger suggests that it is equally appropriate to address Dasein by saying we (e.g., GA,
; GA, /; GA, /, /, /). This hints that we cannot simply identify
Dasein with concrete human individuals. I propose, instead, that Dasein ‘is’ a human particular in
the sense that it depends on ontically identifiable individual human beings, although it is ontologically
distinct from these. This is so because the term Dasein does not refer to individual minded bodies as
such but to the disclosedness or the open realm of manifestation that lets entities show up as entities
(which is, however, enabled by the individual minded bodies) (cf. Malpas ; Sheehan ). As
I will argue in the following, this realm of manifestation can not only refer to the I or the ego of the
individual but also the you of someone else and the we of a group.
 Introduction
which includes relations to oneself, the environment, and other people.
Heidegger’s externalism becomes, then, a form of holism.
To see the social ontological consequences of these different conceptions
of the mind, let us consider what would happen if we were to place two
Cartesian subjects in a room with each other. They would of course have
observational access to each other’s bodies. But since the Cartesian mind is
defined as that which is revealed only by introspection, each Cartesian
subject would only have access to its own mind. Each would hence need
some kind of substitute – a special, as of yet unaccounted for, mental
operation – to access the other as a mind rather than as a mere body.
We would get a very different picture if we were to substitute two Dasein
for the two Cartesian subjects. Now, Dasein is what it is by virtue of
responding to solicitations in the world. These solicitations can take many
forms. An entity solicits one thing if I take it to be inert, and it solicits quite
another thing if I take it to be responsive to solicitations like me. Moreover,
inert entities solicit very different things from me if I am alone compared to
if I am together with someone else. What is crucial is that, in this picture,
the two Dasein need no substitute, no special mental operation, to make
sense of each other. Dasein is what it is by virtue of its being-in-the-world;
similarly, the other ‘is appresented in his fellow Dasein [Mitdasein] by his
world or by our common environment’ (GA, /). Although the
details are missing (e.g., what exactly does it mean to respond to an entity as
a fellow Dasein rather than something inert?), the general suggestion is clear:
The very same ingredients that explain our basic relation to ourselves can in
principle also explain our basic relation to others. In Heidegger’s words:
It also becomes clear, already from the way in which everyone encounters
himself by way of the world, that the experience of alien ‘psychic life’
[fremden ‘Seelenlebens’] as well as my own does not first need a reflection
on lived experience, taken in the traditional sense, in order to apprehend
my own Dasein. Likewise, I do not understand the other in this artificial
way, such that I would have to feel my way into another subject.
I understand him from the world in which he is with me, a world which
is discovered and understandable through the regard in being-with-one-
another. (GA, /)


On this point, my gloss on the concept of Dasein echoes Joanna Hodge’s characterisation of Dasein
as ‘a form of self-relation which is systematically connected to others of the same kind, others of
different kinds, and to the ground of possibility of there being such differences and otherness at all:
to being’ (Hodge , ).

My interpretation is indebted to Jeff Malpas (, , ) who argues that a distinct form of
holism characterises the hermeneutic tradition. See also Chapter  below.
 Introduction 
The Cartesian tradition construes mindedness on the basis of introspection
(‘the reflection on lived experience’), and this makes other minds an
inherently mysterious phenomenon. By arguing that Dasein constitutively
depends on relations to the environment and to other people, Heidegger
believes that he can provide a much stronger foundation for social ontol-
ogy. The problem with the problem of other minds is, in other words, that
it presupposes a flawed conception of the mind – a conception of the mind
that makes the idea of other minds inherently problematic. In contrast,
Heidegger intends to show that a refined conception of the ‘mind’ ulti-
mately dissolves the problem of ‘other minds’.

. Dyads and Triangles

The holist argument that a form of intersubjectivity is built into subjec-
tivity itself – that ‘the question of our fellow Dasein must be understood as
a question of Dasein itself’ (GA, /) – is controversial. In fact, it
puts Heidegger at odds with most contemporary analytical social ontology
as well as recent social phenomenology.
Contemporary analytical social ontology is dominated by what Max
Weber () named methodological individualism, namely, the view that
although we often refer to group agents in everyday life (e.g., teams,
corporations, and nations) these agents must ultimately be explained in
terms of the interaction between distinct individuals. Our account of social
life must end with the attitudes, obligations, and actions of individuals. In
the contemporary landscape, this view is more or less accepted by all major
theories of social cognition and collective intentionality. It is, for instance,
widely accepted that collective intentions are, simply, a special kind of
individual intention or a special kind of interrelation between individual
intentions. Now, if the ultimate level of explanation is that of individuals –
that is, individuals with no pre-existing relations between them – the most
fundamental form of intersubjectivity must be what I’ll call the dyadic
relation, namely, the relation between two distinct individuals that each
has the other individual as his or her intentional object. To take an
influential example, Michael Bratman (, ) argues that in shared
action I must intend that I partake in a shared action, and I must intend

See Tollefson () for an overview of the current debate on collective intentionality.

Searle, controversially, defends not only a methodological individualism but also a methodological
solipsism according to which ‘all intentionality, whether collective or individual, could be had by a
brain in a vat or by a set of brains in vats’ (Searle , ). For discussions of Searle’s solipsism, see
Meijers () and Schmid ().
 Introduction
that you partake in the shared action. Shared action is hence analysable
in terms of individuals, their intentions, and their capacity for intending
each other.
Phenomenologists have recently questioned the intellectualism preva-
lent in contemporary debates on social cognition by revitalising the con-
cept of empathy first developed by Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Max
Scheler. Against the idea that we need some kind of folk-psychological
theory or an internal simulation to understand others as minded creatures,
they argue that empathy is a kind of direct perception in which we
experience bodily behaviour as already minded and intentional. Thus,
rather than seeing a facial expression that must subsequently be interpreted
as an expression of pain, it is argued that what we see simply is pain.
There are of course more cognitively demanding types of intersubjectivity –
e.g., trying to figure out the other’s hidden agenda – but this line of
thought maintains that the subject’s immediate and perceptual directed-
ness to another subject is the most basic form of intersubjectivity because it
alone enables us to understand the other body as a minded body.
In contrast, much post-war French phenomenology amounts to what
we might call an alterity theory. Like empathy theory, alterity theory holds
that the face-to-face relationship is the most foundational form of inter-
subjectivity, but rather than emphasising the subject’s capacity to emphat-
ically understand the other, alterity theory suggests that the face-to-face
relation involves a confrontation with the other that radically eludes my
grasp. It is thus argued that the real significance of intersubjectivity lies in
the fact that the other is transcendent and radically other than me. Sartre,
for instance, argues that any attempt to understand the other based on an a
priori determination of my own being-in-the-world is bound to fail,
because then ‘I find in things only what I have put into them’
(Sartre , ). Likewise, for Levinas, ‘the other does not affect us as
what must be surmounted, enveloped, dominated, but as other, indepen-
dent of us: behind every relation we could sustain with him’ (Levinas
, ). On this view, the primary form of intersubjectivity is, hence,
not a matter of understanding the other but a way in which I myself am
put into question by the other.


Margaret Gilbert’s (, ) plural subject theory claims to differ from Bratman’s account by
being non-reductive. Although she argues that collective intentionality presupposes a plural subject
in which individuals are jointly committed to espouse a goal as a single body, she also admits that a
joint commitment only obtains when two or more individuals express their readiness to undertake a
joint commitment. It seems then that also Gilbert’s plural subject theory relies on ontologically
separate individuals. I discuss Bratman’s and Gilbert’s accounts in detail in Chapter .
 Introduction 
I discuss some of the differences that separate the analytical and the
phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity in Chapters  and , but
here I want to emphasise a point of agreement between these three pro-
posals: they all take the dyadic relation – the thematic or intentional
relation between two subjects – to be foundational for social life.
But does the dyadic relation really establish intersubjectivity? If so, what
makes a self capable of intending another self, what provides the ‘onto-
logical bridge from one’s own subject, which is initially given by itself, to
the other subject, which is initially quite inaccessible’ (SZ, /)? Or is
it rather the case that the dyadic relation uncovers or modifies an explan-
atorily prior form of intersubjectivity? Heidegger defends the latter option
by arguing that the shared world is a presupposition for our intentional
directedness towards others. More specifically, he argues that I can only
make sense of the other as a minded agent if I understand him as
responding to the same world of publicly available things that I respond
to. Rather than conceiving coexistence as a dyad, Heidegger proposes that
there is a fundamental interdependence between self, world, and others so
that each of these three elements is inconceivable without, although
irreducible to, the two others.
Borrowing a term from Donald Davidson, we might say that Heidegger
juxtaposes the dyadic relation prominent in analytical social ontology and
recent phenomenology with a form of triangulation. Dasein understands
itself by virtue of its relation to the world, and since the world is shared,
this includes both environmental objects and other people, e.g., those who
are physically there, those with whom Dasein shares a personal history, and
the anonymous others who are ‘present’ in social norms. Dasein under-
stands others by correlating their behaviour to the environmental objects
and to the interpretative models that it inherits from its history, culture,
and society. Finally, Dasein typically understands environmental objects in
terms of socially inflected standards so that a given tool is understood in
terms of its proper use. Indeed, Heidegger even argues that when such
socially inflected interpretative standards fail, we still understand environ-
mental objects as inherently shared with others:
Every being along something present – also that which is solitary – includes
in itself a being-with-one-another. All uncoveredness of something present
must by its essence be something in which Dasein shares itself with others;
the uncoveredness is therefore such that Dasein never keeps it locked up for
itself as if it were its enclosed possession. All uncoveredness of something
present must essentially already be as shared with. . . (GA, )
 Introduction
Rather than confining being-with to our intentional relations to others, the
model of triangulation suggests that all intentional relations take place
against a holistic background of relations between ourselves, the world,
and others. In my opinion, the first task of social ontology is to account for
this a priori interdependence. The second task is to use this ontological
framework to examine the nature of various social phenomena such as
social cognition, shared action, and group formation.

. World, Solicitude, and Conventions: Locating

Heidegger’s Social Ontology
There have been a great number of studies on the relation between
Heidegger’s ontology and politics as well as ethics, but very few focus
directly on his social ontology. Those that do tend to focus either on
Heidegger’s few remarks on the dyadic relation (what he calls ‘solicitude’
[Fürsorge]) or on his account of anonymous social norms (what he calls ‘the
Anyone’ [das Man]).
Those who focus on the concept of the Anyone argue that the shared
world is made of shared norms, conventions, and social practices and that
all intentional relations take place against this anonymous and pre-
established background structure (Carman ; e.g., Dreyfus ;
Koo , ; Okrent ; Schatzki ). In Hubert Dreyfus’
summary,
Public skills and for-the-sake-of-whichs must be taken over (presumably by
imitation) before there can be any Dasein with thoughts and activities at all.
Society is the ontological source of the familiarity and readiness that makes
the ontical discovering of entities, of others, and even of myself possible.
(Dreyfus , )


Many interpretations of Heidegger’s politics are directly motivated by his affiliation with Nazism,
for example, de Beistegui (), Derrida (), Duff (), Elden (), Fried (),
Lacoue-Labarthe (), and Young (). On Heidegger’s ethics, see Hatab (), Hodge
(), Lewis (), Nancy (), and Webb ().

Hans Bernhard Schmid (, ) is a notable exception. He argues, on the one hand, that the
conventionalist emphasis of the Anyone is insufficient to account for the constitution of the shared
world and, on the other hand, that our manifold non-thematic relations to each other means that
we cannot rely on an analysis of the dyadic relation alone. Schmid thus takes Heidegger to develop a
notion of ‘common disclosure and common concern’ that must be understood as an irreducible,
relational, and often non-thematic structure (Schmid , ). I am sympathetic to Schmid’s
approach but discuss some limitations and problems in Section . and footnote  in
Chapter  below.
 Introduction 
In short, we understand others in terms of the social roles, norms, and
practices that constitute our shared world.
Conversely, those who focus on solicitude agree with Sartre (,
ff ) that if there is nothing more to say about being-with than that
which is contained in the analysis of the Anyone, Dasein is unable to
encounter concrete others (McMullin ; O’Brien ; Olafson ).
As Irene McMullin puts it, the overemphasis on the Anyone suggests that
one can only ever encounter other persons as representative types able to
trigger particular preexisting categories – be they ontic social categories or
the overarching ontological category Mitsein. Individual persons do not play
a role in constituting or developing these categories, but are interchangeable
instances whose uniqueness is subsumed to the category by which one
knows them. (McMullin , )
Her alternative is to develop a more nuanced and distinctly Heideggerian
account of the dyadic relation. In her view, the otherness of the other ‘is
rooted in the finitude and uniqueness of its originary temporality’ in such a
way that the other ‘makes itself known in a past that I can never fully
access and a future that I can never entirely predict’ (McMullin
, ).
Compared to these, my approach is quite untraditional. I believe that
Heidegger’s main contribution to social ontology lies neither in his
remarks on solicitude nor analysis of the Anyone, at least not directly. It
lies, rather, in his analysis of the phenomenon of the world. Seen from this
perspective, the respective analyses of interpersonal understanding and
anonymous social normativity are two (however important) pieces of a
larger social ontological puzzle. The crucial and overarching question is:
What does it mean to share the world?
I answer this question by reconstructing, expanding upon, and at times
criticising the social ontology found in Heidegger’s published text, lecture
courses, and private notes. My main focus will be the period from  to
 in which Heidegger worked most extensively on the transcendental
issue of the world, although I will on occasion use texts from beyond this
period either as a foil or as a supplement to this line of inquiry.
In contrast to many other interpreters, I argue that Heidegger’s point is
not simply the quasi-Wittgensteinian point that typified social practices
underlie our ways of acting and judging. Rather, I show that the notion of
the shared world extends far beyond the background familiarity afforded to
an individual by its community, society, tradition, or language game.
Rather, its non-thematic and triangular relatedness to others render
 Introduction
Dasein constitutively responsive to the behaviour of others – whether or
not they share beliefs, intentions, conventions, or languages. In short,
I share the world with you if and only if we are capable of intending the
same entities or range of entities, and if my way of intending entities is
responsive to your behaviour. Or, less technically, I share the world with
you if your behaviour has a stake, however small, in how I understand the
world that occupies us both.
This is a very minimal type of intersubjectivity. Indeed, as I will argue,
our constitutive openness or responsiveness to others is a transcendental
condition of possibility of Dasein’s intentionality. As such, it characterises
human mindedness and agency whether or not anyone is actually present:
‘Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically
no other is occurrent or perceived. Even Dasein’s being-alone is being-with
in the world’ (SZ, /f ). Being-in-the-shared-world or being-with is a
minimal and necessary form of intersubjectivity. This is not to say, of
course, that nothing more can be said about sociality. Rather, being-with
makes other social phenomena like solicitude and anonymous social
normativity possible. A systematic social ontology must show what unites
these various forms of intersubjectivity and what distinguishes them from
each other.

. A Note on Heidegger’s Politics

I admit that this book draws lessons on social life from a very unlikely
source. Heidegger was not simply a political fool but an unrepentant Nazi.
It seems almost paradoxical to earnestly suggest that someone so politically
ignorant should also possess an unprecedented grasp of the inner workings
of human social life. Yet this is exactly what I argue.
In reply to this worry, one might try to draw a line between Heidegger
as a person and Heidegger as a philosopher and claim that politics befalls the
former while social ontology befalls the latter. But the recent publication of
what is commonly known as the Black Notebooks makes this reply uncon-
vincing since Heidegger in these private notes attempts to philosophically
justify his political engagement as well as his antisemitism.
I will show that there is indeed a crucial connection between
Heidegger’s views on social life and his conception of politics. But the
connection is more complex than one might think, and the impulse to
reject Heidegger’s philosophy tout court is both rash and profoundly
unphilosophical. As I see it, an Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger’s pol-
itics requires that we, first, try to understand how Heidegger himself saw
 Introduction 
the connection between his philosophy and politics and, second, show
exactly where he erred. Heidegger’s social ontology is crucial for this
endeavour since it not only reveals his basic assumptions about social life
in general but also calls attention to the way in which his politics betrayed
some of his own best insights. In due course, I will identify several ways in
which his attempted justification of his political engagement is not just
accidental to but outright incompatible with his social ontology. But it
goes without saying that this critical analysis presupposes a firm grasp of
what Heidegger’s social ontology actually is. For this reason, my discussion
of Heidegger’s politics is found in the last part of the book.

. Outline
Part I of the book examines the relation between Heidegger’s general
conception of ontology, his philosophy of mind, and his conception of
social life. Chapter  outlines and situates Heidegger’s transcendental
phenomenological approach to social ontology in the contemporary land-
scape by discussing what he takes to be the scope and the appropriate
method of social ontology. Chapter  compares Heidegger’s transcenden-
tal social ontology to Husserl’s and argues that although both take ‘the
world’ or ‘transcendence’ to constitute the most basic form of intersubjec-
tivity, Heidegger ultimately understands this in affective and practical
rather than theoretical terms. Chapter  then argues that Heidegger’s
transcendental social ontology entails a commitment to the holist thesis
that intentional states depend on relations to both environmental objects
and other people and discusses whether this amounts to a
vicious relativism.
Part II analyses a range of concrete social phenomena central to both
classical and contemporary social ontology. Chapter  focuses on
Heidegger’s ambiguous and polemical discussion of social cognition.
I first identify six different and seemingly incoherent objections raised by
Heidegger against theories of social cognition, before I set out to recon-
struct a positive, Heideggerian account of interpersonal understanding.
Chapter  turns from the you of face-to-face interaction to the we of shared
action. I argue, first, that we should approach shared action in pre-
reflective terms, namely, as responses to environmental solicitations, and,
second, that Heidegger’s reflections on plural selfhood can help us under-
stand pre-reflective shared action by showing how responses to solicitations
can be joint. Chapter  considers the large-scale and temporally prolonged
interaction of social normativity. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of the
 Introduction
Anyone and of historicity, I argue that there are two distinct types of social
normativity: anonymous social normativity, which comes with only a min-
imal awareness of its own nature, extent, and origin, and historical social
normativity, which implies a historical awareness in which social norms are
disclosed as historical and hence as fragile and contestable.
Part III discusses the controversial issues of Heidegger’s politics and his
account of authenticity. Chapter  outlines Heidegger’s political philoso-
phy paying special attention to how he conceives of community, state, and
education. I then go on to show that Heidegger in the Black Notebooks
attempts to justify his political engagement philosophically in a way that
rests on assumptions and inferences – philosophical mistakes, if you will –
that contradict his earlier and much more convincing social ontology.
Chapter  discusses Heidegger’s notion of authenticity and his conception
of the self. I argue that authenticity requires us to ontically understand our
own nature by adopting a set of ontologically transparent second-order
attitudes on our own lives. I then show how these second-order attitudes
solve two problems inherent to Heidegger’s conception of the self, namely,
that it lacks constancy (in the sense of the capacity of the self to remain
itself through changing situations) and that it lacks autonomy (in the sense
of the capacity to commit to some possibilities rather than others). Finally,
I consider () what the demand for authenticity entails for Heidegger’s
conception of face-to-face relations and his conception of historical com-
munities and () how it differs from moral obligations.
  
Being-In-the-World and Being-With
  

What Is Social Ontology?

Social ontology is often said to study and account for the nature of the
social world. But what exactly is ‘the social world’ and what does it
contain? What does it even mean to ‘give an account’ of it?
Although they are not always discussed explicitly, these questions are
fundamental to social ontology. In this chapter, I will sketch some
common answers to them in order to provide an overview of the field of
social ontology (Section .) before I reconstruct Heidegger’s answers
(Sections .–.).

. Scope and Method

In most definitions, the social world comprises all those things that
ontologically depend on human beings and their mental representations.
To take just two examples, social ontology studies the entities ‘that arise
out of, and depend necessarily upon, human interactions . . .; those, if any,
that could not exist in the absence of human beings and their doings’
(Lawson , ); alternatively, it studies ‘social and institutional entities
or facts’, which are ‘collectively constructed’ and therefore ‘mind-depen-
dent’ (Tuomela et al. , ). This way of thinking about sociality
restricts the scope of social ontology by – either explicitly or implicitly –
distinguishing its proper object from other potential objects, the social
from the non-social.
There are, of course, many ways to draw such a distinction. An influ-
ential and commonsensical way of doing so is by distinguishing between
the social world (e.g., institutions, groups, and artefacts) and two non-
social worlds, namely, the mental world (e.g., beliefs, desires, and memo-
ries) and the physical or natural world (e.g., electrons, geological materials,
and biological organisms).
A social ontology that implicitly or explicitly operates with such a
distinction between the social and the non-social has what I will call a

 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
restricted view of its own scope. As in the above, the restricted view is often
accompanied by the assumption that the social world not only is distinct
from some other world or worlds but also ontologically depends upon these.
This has the methodological implication that the task of social ontology is
to account for the relation of dependency that holds between the social
world and the world(s) on which it depends. Social ontology must provide
‘an account of how the social world is built. What are its building blocks
and how do they come together to build it?’ (Epstein , ). If we
adopt a restricted view of the scope of social ontology and claim that the
social world depends on, for example, the mental world and the natural
world, social ontology must account for the basic mechanism by way of
which the social world emerges out of a set of non-social building blocks.
A highly influential example of such an approach to social ontology
claims that the basic mechanism that produces the social world must be
found in the mental world, that is, in the psychological states of individual
human beings. Let us call this psychologism. Psychologism is often consid-
ered to be the ‘standard model of social ontology’ (Guala ). It suggests
that ‘social entities are constituted by beliefs about beliefs’, and that they,
unlike natural entities, must be ‘constantly re-created (or “performed”) by
individuals by way of collective intentionality’ (Guala , –).
The general idea is that the social world constitutively depends on or is
generated by something that is not itself part of the social world, namely,
the mental or psychological states of individuals. Gilbert formulates the
point well when she notes that ‘individual human beings must see them-
selves in a particular way in order to constitute a collectivity’ (, ).
Psychologism and the standard model of social ontology holds, in other
words, () that collective intentionality creates the social world and () that
the perceptions and thoughts of individuals ground collective
intentionality. Tollefsen summarises the psychologistic method in the
following way: ‘If social facts are not natural kinds but made up or
constituted by individuals’ perceptions of their world, then an explanation
of those social kinds needs to appeal to individuals’ perceptions
(i.e., individual psychology) of themselves vis-à-vis others’ (, ).
Alternatively, one might claim that a successful account of the social
world must appeal to entities and properties contained in the natural


Psychologism, the ontological claim that the mental world constitutes the social world, is distinct
from what Gilbert calls singuralism, namely, the claim that social entities and events are explainable
only with reference to singular agents pursuing their own individual goals (Gilbert , ). It is
entirely possible to reject singuralism but not psychologism by claiming that individual human
beings have the capacity to act and think from the perspective of a group.
 What Is Social Ontology? 
world. Let us call this naturalism. There are, of course, many forms of
naturalism. Different theories offer different demarcations of the natural
world, and they also disagree on whether the appeal to the natural world
complements or substitutes the appeal to the mental world. Behaviourism,
for instance, claims that we need not refer to the psychological states of
agents in order to explain social phenomena and takes agents’ behaviour,
which is in principle available to third-personal observation, to explanato-
rily exhaust the social. Others, such as John Searle, are committed to both
psychologism and naturalism. For Searle, social ontology studies the
‘portions of the real world’ that exists only by virtue of ‘human agreement’
(, ) – that is, the psychology of individuals – but he also insists that
social ontology ‘must respect the basic facts of the structure of the universe’
that are recorded by ‘physics and chemistry, by evolutionary biology and
the other natural sciences’ (, ). For him, the central question of social
ontology concerns the relation of dependency between the social world,
the mental world, and the natural world:
How can there be an objective world of money, property, marriage,
governments, elections, football games, cocktail parties and law courts in
a world that consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force, and in
which some of these particles are organized into systems that are conscious
biological beasts, such as ourselves? (Searle , xi)
Few contemporary authors are as explicit as Searle, but it is not uncom-
mon to combine psychologism and naturalism in this way.
This assumption about the restricted scope of social ontology is, how-
ever, not logically tied to the assumption that social ontology must explain
the social in terms of the non-social. It is possible to insist that the social,
the mental, and the natural are ontologically distinct, but that the order of
dependence or, at least, the order of explanation goes in the other direction
so that, say, the mental must be explained as a function of the social (as is
the case in, for instance, structuralism and functionalism). Alternatively,
one might agree that social and non-social entities are ontologically distinct
but that we cannot explain one in terms of the other. Then we arrive at a
form of social ontological dualism (or – if we hold that the social, the
mental, and the natural are all irreducible to each other – a form of
trialism).


To take two other examples, Tuomela’s theory is ‘based on a science-friendly philosophical
naturalism’ (, ), and Lawson accepts ‘the doctrine of ontological naturalism, the thesis that
everything can be explained in terms of natural causes’ (, ).
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
These different methodological approaches agree that social ontology is
limited in scope. Some, however, doubt that we can make a sharp
distinction between the social and the non-social. For instance, Sally
Haslanger thinks that it is ‘unlikely that there is a non-circular definition’
of what makes something ‘social’ (, ); Epstein writes that ‘it . . . may
be pointless to engage in a lengthy exercise to pin [that which circum-
scribes social facts] down’ (, f ); and Gilbert notes that ‘the
phenomena aptly thought of as “social” are a motley crew’ (, ).
This might be a simple conceptual difficulty (which definition of ‘social’
will accommodate all of our intuitions?), but it could also be a symptom
that there is no substantial difference between the social and the non-
social. The latter is an ontological claim, but from it derives a methodo-
logical one, namely that we get off on the wrong foot if we attempt to
explain the social in terms of the non-social.
If we reject that the social world is a distinct domain of reality, we have
an unrestricted view of the scope of social ontology. The unrestricted view
poses the following methodological questions: What then does social
ontology do? Which kind of knowledge or explanation does it provide?
The unrestricted view does not necessarily claim that it is nonsensical to
distinguish between, for instance, artefacts that are causally created by
human beings and natural kinds but argues, instead, that allegedly non-
social entities, properties, or facts exist (or are conceived to exist in this or
that way) because of a latent social process. This broadens the scope of
social ontology to include entities that are otherwise categorised as mental
or natural. The aim of social ontology is, accordingly, not to explain the
social in terms of the non-social but to describe the way in which a given
(latently or manifestly social) entity depends upon a particular social
process. There are two versions of this approach.
The first version claims that a given entity depends upon an empirical
social structure. In its most radical form, this approach claims not just that
a specific entity or category (e.g., gender or race) depends for its subsis-
tence or its properties upon a particular empirical social formation but that
our conception of reality as such somehow depends on empirical social
factors. Consider, for instance, Peter Winch, who, inspired by the later
Wittgenstein, postulates that ‘[r]eality is not what gives language sense.
What is real and what is unreal shows itself in the sense that language has’
(, ). Given that language is a product of a contingent and
empirical social formation, Winch claims that the very distinction between
the real and the unreal is somehow socially constituted. Another argument
to the same effect can be found in practice theory, which claims that
 What Is Social Ontology? 
entities depend for their intelligibility upon the social practices of which
they are part. The term ‘social practice’ refers, in this context, to a mesh of
organised bundles of human activity and material arrangements of organ-
isms, artefacts, and things (cf. Bourdieu ; Giddens ; Schatzki
a, b). In short, entities are only intelligible within a particular
social practice or context.
The second version claims that entities, properties, and facts are intel-
ligible only due to a transcendental social structure. On this account, there
is no clear-cut distinction between the social and the non-social because
entities exist or appear to us in the way that they do because subjectivity
itself (or, to be precise, the correlation between subject and object) implies
a set of necessary and a priori social relations. On this view, the aim of
social ontology is to account for these necessary and a priori social
relations. Phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and
Heidegger have pursued this type of social ontology in the greatest amount
of detail.

. Fundamental Ontology and Social Ontology

Let us now turn to Heidegger. What does his general conception of
ontology imply for the idea of social ontology?
Both psychologism and naturalism assume that the social world depends
on another domain of reality. That is, they both claim that social entities,
properties, and facts owe their existence to another independent and,
hence, more fundamental substratum of reality in terms of which we must
then account for their existence. As a phenomenologist, Heidegger is
highly critical of this approach. In fact, his conception of ontology under-
cuts this very distinction between dependency and independency, for
example, between mind-dependency and mind-independency. In this
regard, he follows Husserl’s epoché, the methodological ‘bracketing’ of
the question whether or not a given entity exists in itself.
For Husserl, the epoché is the ‘method by which I appreciate myself
purely: as ego, and with my own pure conscious life, in and by which the
entire objective world exists for me and is precisely as it is for me’ (,
). This does not mean that phenomenology is only concerned with
introspection, with the inner life of the phenomenologist. Rather, the basic
idea is that once we bracket the question whether a particular entity is so

In the following, I will refer mainly to entities for stylistic reasons, but the idea also extends to facts
and properties.
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
and so in itself, we get a way out of classical metaphysical puzzles because it
now becomes possible to study the ‘conditions that make possible not the
existence of entities in the world (the issue of existence has been brack-
eted), but their meaning as existing, and indeed their being given as
anything at all’ (Crowell , ). In other words, we study how we
ourselves must be in order for the entities to appear to us as they do. In
Husserl’s vocabulary, phenomenology studies how entities are constituted
in their correlation with the subject. Unfortunately, the term ‘constitution’
is somewhat misleading. The claim is not that the ego somehow ‘produces’
entities or that it provides the ‘material’ of which entities are made (in the
way that we, for instance, just saw Guala claim that ‘social entities are
constituted by beliefs about beliefs’ [, , my italics]). Instead,
phenomenology studies what we might call intentional constitution. In
McManus’ description, intentional constitution is ‘the structuring of an
intentional agent that allows other entities to manifest themselves to it’
(, ).
Heidegger’s phenomenological inquiry thus concerns a different kind of
dependency than the one central to psychologism and naturalism.
Following the epoché, he writes that his phenomenological ontology does
not concern entities as such but being in the sense of ‘that which determines
entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already under-
stood’ (SZ, /f ). Heidegger is not interested in whether a given entity
depends for its subsistence or properties on another entity or set of entities.
His question concerns the being of entities. The term ‘being’ refers, roughly,
to the intentional structure that allows entities to become intelligible. In
short, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology examines how entities depend
for their intelligibility (rather than subsistence or properties) upon a
taken-for-granted intentional structure.
For Heidegger, the aim of ontology is not to explain a given domain of
entities by showing how it causally or constitutively depends on another
domain of entities. Nor is it, as Quine would have it, to take inventory of
the objects in the world. Phenomenology is ontology, for Heidegger,


This is why Heidegger, rather casually, can claim both that ‘only as long as Dasein is . . . “is there”
being’ (SZ, /) and that ‘entities are independent of the experience, the acquaintance, and the
grasping through which they are disclosed, discovered and ascertained’ by us (SZ, /). He
concedes to the common-sense realist that (most or some) entities are causally independent of us,
because he, as a phenomenologist, has no interest in this type of dependency. Instead, he aims to
describe the intentional structure that allows entities to appear in a particular way. This intentional
structure exists only as long as there are intentional agents such as human beings, ‘only as long as
Dasein is’. For a further discussion of idealism and realism in Heidegger, see Blattner (),
Carman (), and Han-Pile ().
 What Is Social Ontology? 
because phenomenology describes what subjectivity must be in order to
encounter different kinds of objects (SZ, /). Heidegger’s ontology
describes the being of entities by accounting for the implicit intentional
structure that makes entities appear to us in the way that they do. This,
however, is not simply a description of what subjectivity is. The point is,
rather, that when describing what something is, we necessarily take our
point of departure in our understanding of what it is. These two elements –
being and understanding of being – are inseparable. As Schear puts it,
‘Heidegger holds that part of what you understand when you understand
what it is to be something is what it is to access it’ (, , my italics). For
instance, to say that something is a rook is also to say something about the
conditions under which this entity is accessible as a rook (rather than, say,
a small piece of wood). Phenomenology is ontology because it describes
not just subjectivity but the basic correlation between human being and
world by way of which entities are meaningful to us.
Phrased differently, rather than studying the entity as something that
causally depends on some other thing or as a higher-order object that
constitutively depends on a set of lower-order constituents, Heidegger’s
ontology explicates how the appearance of a given entity phenomenally
depends on an unthematic and taken-for-granted intentional structure
(cf. SZ, /f ). This ontological project is transcendental like Kant’s
insofar as it aims to make explicit those correlative structures (for Kant,
these are the categories and the forms of intuition) that acts as conditions
of possibility for our experience of entities, although Heidegger’s account
ultimately differs from Kant’s by claiming that the transcendental structure
that binds human and world together must be described in conative,
affective, and indeed social terms.
There is a stark contrast between this phenomenological conception of
ontology and the naturalistic view advocated by someone like Searle.
When arguing that it must respect the ‘basic facts’ of the natural sciences,
Searle stipulates a naturalistic constraint on social ontology, thereby sug-
gesting that the ‘basic facts’ of the natural sciences are the ultimate
explanans. Yet, for Searle, the basic facts have simply fallen from the sky
and are beyond philosophical dispute. Heidegger, by contrast, holds that
all forms of cognition must be subjected to a phenomenological analysis.
He would hence point out that the explanation pursued by someone like
Searle is only possible because of an unquestioned and overlooked tran-
scendental intentional structure. Indeed, natural entities and scientific facts

Cf. McManus (, chapters  and ).
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
are only intelligible as natural entities and scientific facts on the basis of
what Heidegger calls a ‘projection’. The projection is the way in which
certain features of entities are dimmed down (e.g., utility, beauty, sacred-
ness, sentimental value), while others are brought to the fore (e.g., motion,
force, location, time, universal accessibility).
Only ‘in the light’ of a nature which has been projected in this fashion can
anything like a ‘fact’ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and
delimited in terms of this projection. The ‘grounding’ of ‘factual science’
was possible only because the researchers understood that in principle there
are no ‘basic facts’ [‘blossen Tatsachen’]. (SZ, /)
For Heidegger, the ‘basic facts’ of natural science are intelligible only on
the basis of a specific engagement between human being and world. This
means that the naturalist outlook is itself a ‘distinctive way of making
entities present’ [ausgezeichneten Gegenwärtigung] (SZ, /) rather
than the ultimate explanans of all of reality. Heidegger thus finds the very
notion of ‘basic facts’ problematic, because these facts depend on a set of
scientific practices that are themselves in need of phenomenological
clarification.
Turning to the question of scope, it seems, at first, that we might be able
to adopt a phenomenological method and still insist – with, for instance,
Searle – that reality is divided into three different domains, and that social
ontology studies the subset of distinctively social entities. It appears that
we can reject the naturalistic constraint on our methodology and still hold
that social ontology is a subdiscipline of ontology because it studies only a
distinct subset of what there is.
But Heidegger also rejects this idea. He argues, as I will show briefly,
that the intentional structure that allows entities to appear to us by itself
implies a form of intersubjectivity, that is, that being is always a ‘being-
with others’ (SZ, /). If this is correct, sociality cannot simply be a
subset of what there is. Rather, sociality is itself a transcendental condition
of entities appearing in the first place. In Merleau-Ponty’s memorable
phrase, phenomenological analysis ‘slackens the intentional threads which
attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice’ (, xv).
Sociality is one of these threads.
Since they are part of our intentional make-up, Heidegger believes that
social relations characterise human mindedness as such. If this is correct,
the psychology of individuals, the mental world, cannot be the explanans
of the social world, since the psychology of individuals itself presupposes a
form of intersubjectivity. For this reason, psychologism fails. Similarly, the
 What Is Social Ontology? 
naturalistic impulse to explain the social world with reference to a set of
basic facts, the natural world, fails because the basic facts can only appear
as meaningful on the basis of a set of necessary and a priori social relations.
It follows that social ontology should not restrict itself to the study of a
domain of existence but must analyse what I’ll call a dimension of existence.
Borrowing another formulation from Merleau-Ponty, we should conceive
of ‘the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent
field or dimension of existence: I may well turn away from it, but not cease
to be situated relatively to it’ (, ).
We can summarise Heidegger’s approach to social ontology in two
theses. The first concerns the scope of social ontology, and the second
concerns the method of social ontology.
() Sociality is a dimension of the world rather than a domain within
the world.
() Sociality must be accounted for by reference to the de jure or
transcendental social structure of the correlation between human
and world rather than some non-social level of reality or some de
facto or empirical social formation.
Taken together, these theses support the stronger claim that human
mindedness and agency is what it is only by virtue of being embedded in
and engaged with a shared world. This is the central claim of Heidegger’s
social ontology. Although it will take the entire book to defend these
claims, the rest of this chapter provides a preliminary clarification of these
two theses, thereby setting the scene for the chapters to come.
In the next section, I provide an overview of Heidegger’s early attempts
to integrate sociality into his phenomenological ontology. I focus on the
period from  to the publication of SZ in , because Heidegger at
first, like Searle, distinguished between three domains of entities: the
surrounding world [Umwelt], the self-world [Selbstwelt], and the with-
world [Mitwelt]. I then outline how Heidegger comes to his mature view
that sociality, conceived phenomenologically, cannot be restricted to such
a domain of entities but is, instead, a constitutive dimension of the world
as such, which is therefore necessarily a shared world.
This implies that we cannot and should not explain the social dimen-
sion of existence by reducing it to an allegedly non-social level of reality.
The shared world is the holistic cloth from which our understanding of
specific entities is cut. Yet, this idea has been misunderstood in the
contemporary literature, and I will therefore, in the last section, provide
a preliminary clarification of what Heidegger means by ‘world’ and by
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
‘shared’. In anticipation of the arguments in Chapters  and , I argue that
pragmatic conventionalists like Dreyfus and Okrent fail to recognise the
transcendental gist of Heidegger’s social ontology, although they correctly
understand the scope of it. In short, Dreyfus and Okrent believe that we
share the world if and only if we share certain de facto social formations,
namely, conventions or social practices, but I argue that Heidegger is
committed to the de jure claim that we share the world if and only if we
comport ourselves in accordance with wholes of significance that are
responsive to each other’s behaviour and we are capable of intending the
same entities. This claim is considerably stronger, methodologically speak-
ing, since it does not take world sharing to be a function of empirical social
formations but a transcendental condition of human existence as such.

. Domains and Dimensions

In contrast to what he considers to be Husserl’s overly scientific aspira-
tions, young Heidegger envisions a phenomenology capable of illuminat-
ing concrete everyday life. For example, in , he introduces a lecture
course by criticising what he deems to be the fundamental inadequacy of
traditional ontology. ‘From the very start’, he writes, ‘its theme is being-an-
object, i.e., the objectivity of definite objects, and the object as it is given
for an indifferent theoretical meaning’ (GA, /). In contrast, he believes
that ontology should focus on a particular kind of existence: ‘[T]hat entity
which is decisive within philosophical problems: namely, Dasein, from out
of which and for the sake of which philosophy “is”’ (GA, /). Dasein,
he then points out, does not simply name a universal that can be defined in
abstraction from its particular properties. Rather, Dasein is factical in the
sense that Dasein is ‘in each case this Dasein for a while at a particular time’
(GA, /). Thus, Dasein cannot be defined by its what; it cannot be the
thematic object of cognition, but refers essentially to the how of a ‘factical
life’ (GA, /).
In light of this ambition, it is unsurprising that Heidegger tries to
incorporate an investigation of social life into his ontology. Sociality is
an integral part of factical life that profoundly affects how we live both as a
species and as individuals. Ontology – understood as an investigation into
the fundamental structure of Dasein – must include social ontology.
In his early work, there are two distinct ways in which Heidegger tries to
integrate social ontology into fundamental ontology. In the period from
 to , he distinguishes between three different ‘worlds’ – the
surrounding world, the self-world, and the with-world. He understands
 What Is Social Ontology? 
these ‘worlds’ partly as irreducible background conditions for factical life
and partly as distinct domains of innerworldly entities. However, as I will
show, he failed to clearly distinguish between these two conceptions of
sociality, that is, sociality understood as a dimension of the world versus
sociality as a domain within the world. Thus, his early approach to social
ontology was essentially ambiguous and therefore systematically flawed.
Heidegger realised this in  and improved his social ontology concep-
tually and methodologically by accounting for the crucial difference
between these two conceptions of sociality. It is the second approach
that would finally find its way to the important but brief chapter on
being-with in SZ.
In place of an extensive textual analysis (see, however, Knudsen ), a
few representative paragraphs will help us understand the ambiguity in
Heidegger’s first approach to social ontology. In his earliest reflection on
how sociality can become an object of phenomenological inquiry – a
lecture course from the winter semester / – Heidegger illustrates
the concept of the surrounding world by mentioning ‘landscapes, regions,
cities, deserts’ and so on (GA, ). The with-world, in contrast, contains
‘parents, siblings, acquaintances, superiors, [and] teachers’ (GA, ).
Lastly, the self-world concerns everything that I encounter based on the
rhythm of my personal life (GA, ). According to this outline, the
surrounding world refers to publicly accessible material, while the with-
world covers the domain of human objects and the specific role that these
humans play in the life being uncovered. The self-world covers that which
is only accessible to me personally. As Christian Ferencz-Flatz says, each of
the three senses of the world is ‘merely meant as a type of inner-worldly
being’ (, ). Heidegger does not say so directly, yet his illustrations
of the three aspects of the world reveal that he has something like three
different domains in mind – the natural, the mental, and the social world.
The surrounding world, the with-world, and the self-world are thus
supposed to illustrate different parts of the lived world. Yet when
Heidegger tries to formulate what it is to have a world, the distinction
between the structural elements disappears:
Every human carries in itself a reservoir of intelligibility and immediate
accessibilities. There are for a particular group of people certain parts of the
world that are accessible: the tools of daily life, the means of transportation,


For a chronological overview of Heidegger’s conceptions of intersubjectivity from SZ onwards, see
Grosser (a, b).
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
‘public’ institutions (the ‘public’ – the ‘market’ of life), certain accessible
networks of goals: school, parliament, etc. (GA, )
Each human being lives within a horizon of intelligibility and familiarity.
This familiarity, however, is not confined to the individual alone but is
carried by a ‘group of people’, who have thus made a part of the world
accessible to themselves. They have a shared understanding of the tools of
everyday life, for instance, and of various public institutions. This already
contradicts the separation between the with-world and the surrounding
world, between the natural and the social, since both of these domains are
required to describe how an environment (as a collection of tools, build-
ings, institutions, and places) is intelligible for a group of people. The
distinction seems to disappear right after it is made.
Similarly, he explains in / that the world has three distinct
aspects:
‘World’ is that in which one can live (one cannot live in an object). The
world can be formally articulated as surrounding world (milieu), as that
which we encounter, and to which belong not only material things but also
ideal objectivities, the sciences, art, etc. Within this surrounding world is
also the with-world, that is, other human beings in a very specific, factical
characterisation: as a student, a lecturer, as a relative, superior, etc., . . ..
Finally, the ‘I’-self, the self-world, is also found within factical life experi-
ence. (GA, /)
While denying that the world is an object, Heidegger nonetheless illus-
trates the three aspects of the world by listing various objects. The
surrounding world is the domain of material things that we can encounter;
that is, it is the totality of non-human objects that can become intentional
content for us. The with-world is the totality of other people in their
factical roles. The self-world is no longer defined as private, but now as a
form of locus that anchors the lifeworld in the individual (cf. GA, /).
To be sure, Heidegger emphasises that there is no hierarchy between these
three worlds (GA, /) and that they cannot be sharply distinguished
from each other (GA, /). In fact, he explicitly states that the meth-
odological utility of these concepts is to characterise the ‘manner, the how,
of the experiencing of those worlds’ (GA, /) rather than what is
inside them.
This points to a fundamental tension in Heidegger’s thought. On the
one hand, the three worlds refer to a what, and, on the other hand, they
refer to a how. In Heidegger’s terms, there is a tension between content
sense and relational sense (GA, /, /) that characterises the entire
 What Is Social Ontology? 
period from  to . He constantly illustrates the three worlds by
referring to a list or domain of entities that makes up the potential content
of experience, but at the same time he maintains that he is, in fact, not
interested in the content, but how it is given. This points to the conceptual
and methodological shortcoming of the early approach: Heidegger simply
lacks the resources to distinguish between sociality as a domain (e.g., the
list of other people, social roles, and so on) and sociality as a dimension
that constantly overflows any such domain thus also affecting how we
experience ourselves in a ‘self-world’ or how we experience material things
in the ‘surrounding world’.
John van Buren also notes how the three ‘worldly spheres’ constantly
overlap. He explains this by saying that ‘[i]n the flow of experience we are
always oriented primarily to one of these “worlds of caring”, while the
other two are there in the background’ (van Buren , ). While this
certainly makes clear why Heidegger’s examples always complicate his
distinctions, van Buren’s distinction between a foreground and a back-
ground is by itself insufficient to solve the ambiguity in Heidegger’s
account. The problem is that van Buren’s formulation suggests that an
entity of the with-world appears in the foreground, while the entities of the
surrounding world and the self-world are in the background. On this
account, however, we cannot explain what makes a foregrounded entity
a social entity, since the foregrounded or thematic entity is only social by
virtue of backgrounded or non-thematic references to other people.
It is, therefore, necessary to say that the with-world is simultaneously in
the (thematic) foreground and the (non-thematic) background – along
with the backgrounded surrounding world and self-world, of course. Van
Buren’s distinction between an experiential foreground and an experiential
background does not, therefore, solve the ambiguity of Heidegger’s con-
cept of the with-world. It is, in short, not radical enough in its distinction
between the thematic and the non-thematic structures of human com-
portment, between domains within the world and dimensions of
the world.
Heidegger draws this conclusion in . Influenced by his simulta-
neous lectures on Aristotle’s practical philosophy, he gives a talk called
‘The Concept of Time’ for the Department of Theology at the University
of Marburg. Here he abandons the terminology of the with-world in
favour of the concept of being-with-each-other [Miteinandersein]. This
new terminology indicates a change in the social ontological architecture
of his thought. He now claims that being-with-each-other characterise
Dasein regardless of whether other people are actually present or whether
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
they are actually intended. In other words, our being-with-each-other is
in principle independent of the entities previously used to illustrate the
with-world:
As ‘being-in-the-world,’ Dasein is at the same time being-with-each-other
[miteinandersein, sic]. The aim here is not to assert that mostly we do not
exist as single persons, that others are also present. Rather, ‘being-with-
each-other’ implies an ontological characteristic of Dasein that is equipri-
mordial with ‘being-in-the-world.’ This aspect of Dasein persists even if no
one else is actually spoken to or perceived. (GA, /)
This reformulation finally solves the tension by insisting that sociality, as a
dimension of experience, goes beyond any domain of objects. Sociality is
posited as being equiprimordial with being-in-the-world and thus given a
transcendental status: When there is Da, there is also a Mit.
A little later, in a lecture course from , Heidegger even comments
on his earlier terminology and explains that he now realises that his focus
on entities (as opposed to the world as such) was confused. The concepts
of being-with [Mitsein], being-with-each-other [Miteinandersein], and
fellow Dasein [Mitdasein] remedies this fault:
the worldhood of the world appresents not only world-things [Weltdinge] –
the surrounding world in the narrower sense – but also, although not as
worldly being [weltliches Sein], the fellow Dasein of others and my own
self. . . . Not to be denied phenomenally is the finding that fellow Dasein –
the Dasein of others – and my own Dasein are encountered by way of the
world. On the strength of this worldly encountering of others, they can be
distinguished from the world-things in their being occurrent or available in
the surrounding world and demarcate them as a ‘with-world,’ while my
own Dasein, insofar as it is encountered in the surroundings, can be grasped
as the ‘self-world.’ This is the way I saw things in my earlier courses and
coined the terms accordingly. But the matter is completely wrong. The
terminology shows that the phenomena are not adequately grasped in this
way, that the others, though they are encountered in the world, really do
not have and never have the world’s kind of being. The others, therefore,
cannot be designated as a ‘with-world.’ (GA, /f )
In this passage, Heidegger offers one formulation of his central thesis,
namely, the idea that we encounter ourselves, others, and things (‘world-
things’, as he calls them) on the basis of the phenomenon of the world. As
he explains, he earlier tried to formulate this thesis by calling the domain of
other people for ‘the with-world’. Now, however, he realises that this
terminology confuses different ontological levels. The entities, with which
Heidegger illustrated the surrounding world and the with-world, are given
 What Is Social Ontology? 
within a world. That is to say, these domains of entities are innerworldly
and do not, therefore, have the ontological structure of the world. They do
not have ‘worldly being’ [weltliches Sein].
Innerworldly entities are meaningful due to the place they occupy
within the world. The world is the realm of intelligibility in which other
Dasein or tools appear to me. Therefore, the world must necessarily be of a
different ontological order than these innerworldly entities. The terminol-
ogy of the with-world blurs this distinction and leads us to mistakenly
believe that others, who are strictly speaking within the world, can be
conceptualised as a form of world.
To avoid this confusion, Heidegger coins the term ‘being-with’
[Mitsein]. The benefit is that being-with cannot be separated from other
aspects of the world. Furthermore, the concept of being-with makes clear
that sociality is equiprimordial with being-in-the-world and thus not
something that occurs occasionally when we encounter another Dasein.
Most importantly, being-with finalises the separation between sociality as a
transcendental condition that cuts across all domains and sociality as a
term designating a certain type of innerworldly entities. This is, of course,
not to say that Heidegger completely disregards that there is a domain of
objects that is ontologically similar to ourselves. This is what he calls
‘fellow Dasein [Mitdasein]’. As he states programmatically in SZ:
By reason of the with-like [mithaften] being-in-the-world, the world is
always the one that I share with others. The world of Dasein is a with-
world. Being-in is being-with others. Their innerworldly being-in-them-
selves [innerweltliche Ansichsein] is fellow Dasein. (SZ, /)
Thus, his attempts to integrate sociality into phenomenological ontology
lead Heidegger to claim that sociality is a dimension, not a domain, of
the world.

. Sociality De Facto, Sociality De Jure

This historical analysis makes clear that the object of social ontology is the
shared world, and that we should be careful not to understand the term
‘world’ as referring to a domain of entities. Moreover, it displays how a
recognition of the ontological difference between entities within the world
and the being of the entities determined by the structure of the world
widens the scope of social ontology. Before we can explain the meaning of
the shared world, we must, however, clarify what exactly the world is if it is
neither an entity nor a sum of entities.
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
Heidegger distinguishes between () an ordinary and () a phenomeno-
logical concept of world (GA, f/f ). The ordinary concept of the
world means something like a collection of entities. SZ calls this concept of
the world categorical as opposed to existential (SZ, /). It divides into
two subcategories:
(a) The ontic-categorical sense of world designates all particular entities
taken together. This is what we usually call the universe.
(b) The ontological-categorical sense of world designates a set of indi-
vidual entities in terms of the essential properties that define the set,
for example, the ‘world’ of mathematics in the sense of the domain
of all possible mathematical objects.
The phenomenological concept of the world is existential as it describes
the world as pertaining to human existence (SZ, /). This is also
divided into two subcategories:
(a) The ontic-existential sense of the world designates ‘that “wherein” a
factical Dasein as such can be said to “live”’ (SZ, /). World, in
this sense, refers to a realm of familiarity like when we talk of ‘the
world of commerce’ or ‘the world of the native’. This world is a
system of practices, instruments, and roles that are taken for granted
while making our everyday dealings with each other and our
environment possible.
(b) The ontological-existential sense of the world is what Heidegger calls
the world, in contrast to the plurality of worlds in (a) (SZ, /),
or simply worldhood (SZ, /). This is the manner of being of all
the particular realms of familiarity designated by the ontic-
existential sense of the world. It is the a priori structure that
characterises all Dasein and all of Dasein’s particular worlds.
It is important to note that the two subcategories of the phenomenological
concept of the world do not amount to a type/token-distinction, since the
worlds (a) are not innerworldly entities. Instead, we might say that worlds
(a) are factical modes of the world (b) (SZ, /).
Dreyfus explains the distinction between (a) and (b) in the following way:
The structure of the world is ‘a priori’ only in the weak sense that it is given
as already structuring any subworld. The best we can do is point out to
those who dwell in the world with us certain prominent structural aspects of
this actual world. If we can show a structure to be common to the world
and each its modes, we shall have found the structure of the world as such.
(Dreyfus , )
 What Is Social Ontology? 
This is telling for Heidegger’s general approach to a priori claims: He does
not suggest that a particular proposition is apodictically true, nor does he
assert that the existence of a particular entity is necessary tout court. Rather,
he analyses a mode of existence from within. He starts with a concrete
experience and attempts to uncover what must be the case in order for this
experience to be the way it is. This means that although his starting point
is always something factical – say, my experience of using a hammer – he
aims to uncover something that ‘already’ or ‘a priorily’ structures this
experience and others like it. The ambition is, then, not to issue de facto
claims about a world in the ontic-existential sense (a) but de jure claims
that hold for all such worlds (b).
This fourfold distinction reveals that when ‘the social world’ or ‘the
with-world’ refers to the totality of social facts or the domain of other
people and their social roles, the term ‘world’ is used in the ordinary
ontological-categorical sense (b). Furthermore, it suggests that it is pos-
sible to conduct a phenomenologically inspired ethnographical or socio-
logical investigation of a specific social world (in the sense of a), say, the
world of the Inuit, which would then investigate the particular realm of
familiarity inhabited by the Inuit as a constellation of practices, rituals,
instruments, social roles and so on. Yet, social ontology, as Heidegger
understands it, must describe the a priori social structure of any such given
world. Hence the transcendental claim, ‘the world is always the one that
I share with others’ (SZ, /).
The next question is of course: What exactly is the a priori structure of
the world? SZ claims that the world consists of a ‘whole of references’,
which is presupposed in our everyday involvement with various entities
(SZ, /). The hammer is meaningful only if we already understand a
whole set of other things (the nail, the boards, the windows to be covered,
the oncoming storm). This whole lets the hammer appear as a hammer by
allowing us to encounter it within a structure of what Heidegger calls ‘in-
order-to’ [Um-zu] relations. The hammer is what it is by appearing within
a field of practical possibilities. It appears as a hammer in order to drive in
the nail, which we do in order to board up the windows and so on.
To understand how this ‘whole of references’ functions, we need to
distinguish between two types of awareness. In our dealing with things, we
tend to orient ourselves towards or focus upon a single entity or a single
relation between entities (e.g., the position of the hammer). We are, as
I will say, thematically aware of this particular aspect of our experiential
field. By ‘thematic’, I do not mean that we necessarily perceive an entity
for the sake of perception alone nor that we necessarily think about it in
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
explicit terms. Thematic awareness can be both practical, cognitive, and
affective; it names simply a way of being intentionally directed towards an
object. Importantly, Heidegger claims that thematic awareness presup-
poses a whole of references that we do not direct ourselves towards in this
manner. While the hammer might be the object of my thematic awareness,
I am also aware of a network of entities and relations between entities that
I do not direct myself towards. Our relation to these things and relations is,
hence, non-thematic. Such non-thematic entities and relations are still
tacitly operative in our thematic awareness of an object. Without a tacit
understanding of the oncoming storm, my comportment towards the
hammer would be very different. For this reason, and in contrast to
thematic awareness, we also have non-thematic awareness. The ‘whole of
references’ is largely non-thematic with only a single element being the
object of our thematic awareness.
One might object that ‘non-thematic awareness’ is an oxymoron – that all
awareness is necessarily thematic and that the processes on which our
awareness relies are not themselves matters of awareness. To see that this
is not the case, we must distinguish between two different kinds of processes
on which our thematic awareness might rely. On the one hand, our
awareness of an object clearly depends on causal processes, for example,
neurological functions. Usually, we only have a very poor understanding of
our neurological functions, if any at all. On the other hand, our awareness of
an object also depends on another kind of process that is distinguished from
the first by the fact that we do, in fact, understand these. Let us call these
hermeneutic processes. Of course, hermeneutic processes are not present to
mind as this would render them instances of thematic awareness. Yet, they
differ from purely causal processes, since we necessarily have a background
understanding of hermeneutic processes. By this, I mean that if a herme-
neutic process were to fail, we would not only cease being thematically aware
of the object in question but would, instead, become thematically aware of
the failed hermeneutic process itself. To use Heidegger’s formulation, the
hermeneutic process, on which we non-thematically relied, would suddenly
become ‘conspicuous’ (SZ, /). If the nails I have chosen for my project
are too short for the task at hand or if I suddenly glimpse through the
window that the storm has passed, I no longer direct my awareness to the
hammer in the same way as I did before; instead, my attention is drawn
towards an element in the whole of references on which my previous
comportment relied non-thematically. In contrast, if a purely causal process
fails – say, I have a mild stroke – this also disrupts my hammering, but the
failed process need not come to my attention.
 What Is Social Ontology? 
For Heidegger, all understanding is holistic because any act of thematic
understanding takes place within a non-thematic whole of references.
Heidegger uses the term ‘signifying’ to refer to the relation between what
is thematically understood and what is non-thematically presupposed in
this act of understanding. The hammer is significant by virtue of its
relations to the nails, the window, and so on. Heidegger then says that
‘[t]he relational whole of this signifying we call “significance”. This is what
makes up the structure of the world – the structure of that wherein Dasein
as such already is’ (SZ, /). Clarifying the initial definition of the
world as a ‘whole of reference’, we now see that the world is the relational
whole of significance that makes our involvement with entities possible.
In this context, ‘whole of significance’ means both () that it is a whole
that signifies in the sense of (tacitly and non-thematically) referring some-
thing (the hammer) to something else (the nails) and () that this whole is
significant in the sense of being important to someone. This latter point
follows from the fact that the in-order-to relations cannot go on ad
infinitum. In the end, the in-order-to relations must also refer to some-
thing for-the-sake-of which these relations matter; that is, the relations of
significance must ultimately refer to someone for whom they
are significant.
The ‘world’ is hence neither subjective nor objective. It is not subjective
as it clearly involves relations between non-mental entities. Hammering
becomes meaningless if I run out of nails. But it is not objective either
since the relations of significance that hold between these non-mental
entities are established by the specific projects of an agent. Using a
contemporary term, we can say that the in-order-to’s are affordances.
Affordances are neither objective nor subjective but a way in which the
environment appears to an agent based on the abilities and dispositions of
this agent. The for-the-sake-of, on the other hand, indicates that not all
affordances are salient at the same time. In order for an affordance to
motivate me to act, it must be significant to me. This is established
through the tacit or non-thematic self-understanding that accompanies
an act of understanding: The act of understanding places an entity within
a field of possibilities (qua the in-order-to relations or affordances) and this
necessarily refers back to an agent for whom to actualise such a possibility
is also to actualise a future possibility of being this or that (qua the for-the-
sake-of relation).
We might say, then, that the for-the-sake-of is a commitment because
my ongoing engagement in a relational whole – my ongoing attempt to be
this or that – is normatively significant to me. It offers me a way of
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
understanding myself in which I can succeed or fail. If, for instance,
I engage in the project of hammering in order to board up the windows
so that I can protect my family from the storm, I use the hammer for the
sake of being a good father and husband. I am thus committed to the
activity of hammering through a normatively significant self-awareness.
I measure myself and my activities in light of being a good father and
husband, and I am aware – even if I do not think about it, and even if
I might not be able to specify exactly how – that I can succeed or fail in this
regard. This commitment is self-referential, since it, in the end, comes
down to my self-understanding. There is no further level of explanation of
why I want to be a good father. It is simply a matter of who I take myself to
be. This is one reason why Dasein is an entity ‘that in its being has this
very being as an issue’ (SZ, /).
Significance is a relation that involves two elements: () the environ-
mental affordances inflected by an agent’s abilities and dispositions and ()
the agent’s self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered
through some of these affordances. Based on these two elements, a whole
of significance offers a set of practical possibilities to Dasein. Let us call the
set of possibilities thus outlined for an existential projection. Similarly, let us
call the type of selfhood defined by its participation in a whole of
significance for existential selfhood.
Mark Okrent provides a classical formulation of the connection
between existential projections and existential selfhood that capture some
of the same features that my definition of significance does:
‘The world’ is the most general and all-encompassing field of functional
relations in terms of which we practically understand each thing we
encounter. The world is, as it were, the functionality contexture
[Bewandtnisganzheit] of all functionality contextures, the whole in which
specific equipmental contexts [Zeugzusammenhang] have their place. Its
structure is the structure of functional relations as such – a structure that
is also the structure of existential self-understanding. (Okrent , )
I agree with Okrent that the world is, at the same time, a teleological and a
normative structure and that it weaves together practical utility and self-
understanding. However, it is not clear how this gloss on the phenome-
nological concept of the world helps us understand social life. Indeed,
formulations like Okrent’s seem more or less blind to the possibility of a
world containing people and not just tools. Surely, we miss something
crucial if we try to describe social life in terms of functional relations and
existential self-understandings.
 What Is Social Ontology? 
Heidegger points out that the priority given to the tool analysis is a
purely didactic one (GA, /; cf. GA, n/n; GA/,
/) and says that it would be a ‘violent constriction of the analysis of
the world’ if we were to leave out social relations (GA, /). We
should, hence, be hesitant to take the ‘structure of functional relations’ to
be a kind of ‘basic layer’ [Urgrund] (cf. SZ, /) capable of providing
the (non-social) building blocks needed to understand all features of social
life, as some critics take Heidegger to do.
We need then to clarify the sense in which our being-with-others
modifies the structure of being-in-the-world. How is the world, as a
relational whole of significance, shared with others? An influential line of
interpretation, which I will call the pragmatic conventionalist interpretation
(PCI), answers this question by reference to Heidegger’s analysis of the
Anyone. Dreyfus, for instance, writes
that Dasein’s familiarity with significance depends on Dasein’s taking over
for-the-sake-of-whichs provided by society. Heidegger’s basic point is that the
background familiarity that underlies all coping and all intentional states is
not a plurality of subjective belief systems including mutual beliefs about
each others’ beliefs, but rather an agreement in ways of acting and judging
in to which human beings, by the time they have Dasein in them, are
‘always already’ socialized. (Dreyfus , , my italics)
The defining feature of PCI is that it takes the sharedness of the world to
be a function of our socialisation into a society, understood as a more or
less well-defined and stable set of social practices. This set of social
practices is prior to our explicit agreement and provides a taken-for-
granted condition of possibility for our interaction with our environment
and each other by defining what counts as right and wrong use of tools and
right and wrong social interaction. PCI is pragmatic because it emphasises
the importance of social practices rather than explicit agreements and
individual beliefs; it is conventional because it takes social practices, under-
stood as relatively stable patterns of social interaction, to determine how
we comport ourselves to entities.


Michael Theunissen, for instance, writes: ‘For the world, in the ontological meaning in which it is
taken here, is organised by the self in the total structure of Dasein as the for-the-sake-of-which
(Worumwillen) of a referential totality. The self is, however, the existential place in which the I is
preserved. So, with Heidegger, even the Other, in the transcendental sense, has to be aligned with
“me”: he is the projected of my project and is not to be distinguished, in this respect, from the
[available, NK]’ (Theunissen , ). Varieties of this criticism can also be found in Buber
(), Löwith (), Levinas (), Habermas (), and, most recently, Darwall ().
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
For Dreyfus (, ), ‘[w]hat we share’, when we share the world, ‘is
simply our average comportment’. Thus, two people share the world if
they comport themselves to entities according to the same typified pattern,
that is, when they have a pragmatic convention in common. Drawing on
Wittgenstein, he then argues that ‘once a practice has been explained by
appealing to what one does, no more basic explanation is possible’
(Dreyfus , ).
Similarly, Okrent argues that
[a] world is shared insofar as there are typical and proper uses for tools,
typical and proper equipmental and functional contextures, and interlock-
ing social patterns of purposive activity in which means and ends are
purposively integrated across a group of individuals. . . . I am with others
insofar as my behavior is proper within my community. (Okrent , , my
italics)
The suggestion is, hence, that the behaviour of the social groups in which
we live crystallises into a world without us being aware of it. In this way,
pragmatic conventions are the ‘source of intelligibility’ (Dreyfus ,
ff ). We should, therefore, take it quite literally, when Okrent writes
that ‘I am with others insofar as my behaviour is proper within my
community’ (Okrent , ) and that ‘[t]he others with whom I share
a world are those who are like me’ (Okrent , ). This does not mean
that I share the world with those who are ontologically like me (and, hence,
that I share the world with all Dasein) but simply that I share the world
with those who are sociologically like me, that is, those who belong to the
same community (Okrent) or society (Dreyfus) as I do.
Although Heidegger’s analysis of the Anyone certainly plays an impor-
tant role in his social ontology, this line of interpretation has several
shortcomings. First, the attempt to explain the world as a function of
social groups begs the question of social ontology. After all, a – if not the –
central aim of social ontology is to explain how groups, communities, and
societies are possible. This being the case, we cannot simply presuppose a
specific social formation to be the source of intelligibility. If social ontology
is a meaningful endeavour, it must be possible to somehow get behind such
social formations, to conceptualise their necessary structure, and to explain
how this dimension fits with the other dimensions of human life.
Dreyfus might still insist that the appeal to certain typified modes of
comportment is the best form of explanation that we can hope for. This,
however, is not Heidegger’s view. His central social ontological claim is not
that some factical social formation – like the pragmatic convention
 What Is Social Ontology? 
regarding right and wrong ways of comporting oneself – constitutes the
ultimate source of intelligibility. Rather, he claims that being-with is a
transcendental condition – a necessary structure of all human understand-
ing – and that this transcendental condition, in turn, makes concrete social
formation such as a typified comportmental pattern possible. The fact
that being-in-the-world and being-with-one-another are equiprimordial
enables ‘the various possibilities of community as well as of society’
(GA, /).
In short, we need to explain particular social formations in terms of the
world rather than the other way around. Although still unfulfilled, the task
is clear: Social ontology must account for the de jure relations between
human beings that make various de facto social formations possible.
Second, PCI’s claim that we share the world with those that comport
themselves to entities according to the same typified pattern as us leaves us
wondering: What, then, do we have in common with those who are
socialised into different societies? What sort of common ground or shared
understanding can be reached between people that do not share the same
pragmatic convention? One might worry that Heidegger’s holism – his
insistence that all acts of understanding rely on a holistic and socially
constituted background – leads to an untenable relativism that renders
intercommunal understanding impossible. I discuss this issue in
Chapter .
A third problem is that the conventionalist reading threatens to make a
caricature of not just intercommunal understanding but all forms of social
cognition. If we accept that the Anyone is the source of intelligibility, we
might be unable to understand others as anything but instances of their
social roles. McMullin formulates the point well: ‘The problem . . . is that
Heidegger’s account seems to fall into the danger of viewing other Dasein
merely as interchangeable representatives of the public norms and mean-
ings through which we all pursue our particular abilities to be’ (McMullin
, ). Although anonymous social norms certainly permeate social
life, we also need an account of how we experience others as concrete and
unique fellow Dasein rather than just embodiments of a public norm.
I turn to this issue of interpersonal understanding in Chapter .
In what follows, I will argue that we need a more complex account of
the world and a more sophisticated understanding of what it is to share it if
we are to solve these problems. To put it briefly, PCI claims that


See Chapter .
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
Two individuals, A and B, share a world if and only if A and B
comport themselves towards entities in accordance with the same
whole of significance that is afforded to them by a specific (set of )
social practice(s).
I, on the other hand, argue that
An individual, A, shares the world with another individual, B, if and
only if
() A comports himself in accordance with a whole of significance that is
responsive to the behaviour of B,
() A tacitly assumes B to be capable of intending the same entities as A.
Similarly,
Two individuals, A and B, share the world with each other symmet-
rically if and only if
()(a) A comports himself in accordance with a whole of significance
that is responsive to the behaviour of B and (b) B comports himself in
accordance with a whole of significance that is responsive to the
behaviour of A,
()(a) A tacitly assumes B to be capable of comporting himself
towards the same entities as A and (b) B tacitly assumes A to be
capable of comporting himself towards the same entities as B.
Chapter  argues in more detail for this account of world sharing and
shows why our capacity to intend the same entities is crucial. Here it
should be noted that I deliberately emphasise our capacity to intend the
same entities, since we should not confuse world sharing – a very basic
form of sociality – with something like joint attention in which this
capacity is enacted. It is also on purpose that the reliance on other people
in () is vaguely described in terms of being ‘responsive’. I intend this to
include both those kinds of dependency of which we are explicitly or
thematically aware, for example, the thematic other-awareness of a face-to-
face encounter, and non-thematic relations like those between strangers
sitting next to each other on a bus. In Section ., I discuss the possibility
of asymmetric world sharing by considering human–animal interaction in
which the animal, at least if we follow Heidegger, is structurally incapable
of intending the same entities as us.
There is a very minimal sense of the word to share at stake here. Indeed,
what we share is not something empirical that can be measured and
formulated in terms of an average or a shared norm. Rather, what we
 What Is Social Ontology? 
share is a transcendental structure – a common condition of being a
human agent or self. For Heidegger, this condition renders us fundamen-
tally responsive to each other, always already related to each other. As a
minimal kind of sharing, this allows a great degree of differentiation. We,
of course, share the world with those with whom we share a personal
history, a convention, a language, or a common project. But we also share
the world with those with whom we do not have a personal history, who
are raised according to different conventions and in different languages,
and who partake in different – perhaps even opposing – projects. This
differentiated notion of sharing resonates well with the German word for
sharing, teilen, which means both to have something in common but also
to divide.
Although somewhat overlooked by Heidegger scholars, it is not unprec-
edented to extrapolate such a minimal and differentiated notion of world
sharing from Heidegger. In fact, it is central to both Hannah Arendt’s and
Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on being-with. Nancy claims, with an ambiguity
reminiscent of Heidegger’s German, that ‘we share what divides us [nous
partageons ce qui nous partage]’ (Nancy , ). Similarly, Arendt
describes her notion of the world by using the image of a table:
To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is
between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those
who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates
men at the same time. (Arendt , ).
Rather than designating a specific social formation, the world is the
common condition that relates and separates us at the same time. Only if
we keep this in mind can we account for the common ground of the many
different and more robust forms of interaction that make up
human coexistence.
  

Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl

and Heidegger

Heidegger’s idea that the world necessarily includes relations to others

echoes Husserl’s notion of transcendental intersubjectivity. They are
united by the idea that the most basic form of coexistence is to be found
in our very relation to ‘the world’ or to ‘transcendence’. Nonetheless, they
disagree about how to conceive of ‘the world’ and of ‘transcendence’ and
this has wide-ranging consequences for their respective conceptions
of sociality.
Before starting we should note two points that make a comparison
between them difficult. First, Heidegger often comments on his relation
to Husserl, but his assessment of his mentor’s influence varies greatly. In
one place Heidegger says that Husserl ‘opened his eyes’ philosophically
(GA, /), but elsewhere he criticises Husserl for making a worldless and
solipsistic subject the cornerstone of phenomenology (e.g., SZ, f/f;
GA, f/f; GA, ). Furthermore, Heidegger’s discussion of
other phenomenological approaches to social life is mainly a series of more
or less polemical attacks on the notion of empathy, which is important to
but not exhaustive of Husserl’s social ontology.
Second, we cannot speak of ‘Husserl’s position’ and ‘Heidegger’s posi-
tion’ as if these were unambiguous. Their respective intellectual develop-
ments are complex and involve both minor inconsistencies and outright
changes of heart. For instance, Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, Ideas II,
and Crisis all offer distinct approaches to intersubjectivity. For this reason,
I will rely mainly on the systematic reconstruction of Husserl’s transcen-
dental intersubjectivity offered by Dan Zahavi (). In Heidegger’s case,
his relation to transcendental philosophy changed during the ‘s, and this
poses an obvious challenge to my interpretation.
In Section ., I outline Husserl’s transcendental theory of intersubjec-
tivity, emphasising the approach that brings him closest to Heidegger’s
preoccupation with the shared world. In Section ., I interpret
Heidegger’s critique of Husserl and argue that although they both claim

 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
that the most fundamental form of sociality is transcendental, Heidegger’s
rejection of Husserl’s branch of transcendental phenomenology is partly
motivated by social ontological concerns. In short, Heidegger argues that
Husserl’s account of transcendence is caught up in the Cartesian project of
accounting for objectivity and that this causes him to mischaracterise the
fundamental structure of both human subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
Section . spells out Heidegger’s competing interpretation of the relation
between transcendence and sociality. Pace Husserl, Heidegger’s transcen-
dental ontology understands subjectivity and intersubjectivity as inherently
woven together in a practical and affective world. Drawing on the idea of
existential selfhood, his central claim is that the same field of entities can,
by transcendental necessity, be subjected to a multitude of existential
projections and that this transcendental necessity constitutes the most
basic form of intersubjectivity. Lastly, Section . examines Heidegger’s
later rejection of transcendental phenomenology and considers the extent
to which this challenges my interpretation.

. Husserl’s Paths to Intersubjectivity

It was once commonplace to claim that transcendental phenomenology,
Husserl’s in particular, was monological and radically incapable of
accounting for social life (e.g., Theunissen ). Commentators
(Kjosavik et al. ; Overgaard ; Zahavi ) have shown that this
criticism rests on a caricature and that Husserl’s analysis of intersubjectiv-
ity is much more complex than is usually believed. Central to these
accounts is the argument that intersubjectivity is not only compatible with
Husserl’s phenomenology and the concept of the transcendental subject
but even necessary for his philosophical project in general.
‘[S]ubjectivity’, Husserl writes in Crisis, ‘is what it is – an ego function-
ing constitutively – only within intersubjectivity’ (Husserl , ).
This suggests that Husserl’s interest in intersubjectivity springs directly
from his work on the problem of constitution. For him, the task of
phenomenology is to understand the world that gives itself to the tran-
scendental subject, and correspondingly, the task for a phenomenology of
intersubjectivity is to show how intersubjectivity plays a part in the
constitution of the world. More specifically, Husserl argues that intersub-
jectivity is transcendental insofar as only a primordial community of
transcendental subjects can explain the categories of transcendence, objec-
tivity, and reality.
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
Nonetheless, Husserl vacillates between two different paths to this
systematic goal. He hesitates when it comes to the crucial question
whether intersubjectivity is grounded in the dyadic relation of empathy
or whether this experience itself requires a more fundamental openness
to others.
In Cartesian Meditations, for instance, Husserl comments on empathy
theory by saying that ‘the range of such a theory is much greater than at
first it seems, [because] it contributes to the founding of a transcendental
theory of the objective world’ (Husserl , ). Here Husserl analyses
intersubjectivity in terms of a hierarchy of foundation where empathy
makes objectivity (and, later, culture) possible. Cartesian Meditations then
turns to the reduction of the sphere of ownness [Eigenheitssphäre], where
we are asked to bracket all acts of constitution that rely on foreign
subjectivity, to show how these are made possible by an ‘analogical
apperception’, where the ego experiences the alter ago as having a body
like its own.
Elsewhere, however, Husserl argues the opposite point, namely, that
empathy is only made possible by another form of intersubjectivity. He
thereby proposes another and contradicting hierarchy of foundation.
‘When empathy occurs – is perhaps community, intersubjectivity also
already there, and does empathy then merely accomplish the disclosure
of it?’ (Husserl, quoted in Zahavi , ) In this case, the objective
world makes empathy possible rather than the other way around. Timo
Miettinen explains the reasoning well:
Since the relation between the self and other is characterized by an inevi-
table discrepancy (Widerstreit) between two personal ‘worlds’ of experience,
even empathy must have its foundation in something that is shared: the
experience of a common nature. (Miettinen , )
To become aware of another consciousness, the ego must already perceive
this other as having a perspective on the same intersubjectively constituted
world as itself. In light of this approach, the reduction to the sphere of
ownness seems self-defeating, since the analogical apperception will never
get off the ground without this more basic form of intersubjectivity. This is
not the place to go into a detailed discussion of the merits and problems of
Cartesian Meditations. Instead, I will follow this second path of Husserl’s
theory of intersubjectivity insofar as it is, arguably, the most systematically
promising and, definitely, the path closest to Heidegger’s.
In the first draft of the Fifth Meditation, Husserl comments upon the
experience of the alter ego:
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
Thus, the transcendental subjectivity expands to intersubjectivity or
rather, actually speaking, it does not expand, rather the transcendental
subjectivity only understands itself better [NK, my italics]. It understands
itself as a primordial monad that intentionally carries other monads
within itself, that necessarily posits transcendental others within itself.
(Husserl c, )
If one holds that empathy is foundational for social ontology, it makes
sense to say that the encounter with the other entails a progression or an
expansion of the realm of inquiry from mere subjectivity to that of
intersubjectivity. However, as Husserl points out, there is no such expan-
sion. Rather, the encounter with the other merely allows transcendental
subjectivity to understand itself as what it already is, namely, as transcen-
dental intersubjectivity. This indicates that a form of sociality is prior to
empathy, even if the actual encounter with the other helps to clarify this
underlying structure. Transcendental subjectivity necessarily carries ‘tran-
scendental others’ within itself.
The necessity of positing transcendental others is explained by the way
that empathy (as an apperception of the other made possible by the
experience of the other’s body) already presupposes a world, which, as it
turns out, must be a shared world. Any subject perceiving an object must
already conceive of this object as something that can be perceived from
multiple perspectives. The object is what it is only within a ‘system of
appearances’ [Erscheinungssystem] that can be actualised by several subjects
(Husserl b, ). In this way, the very categories of objectivity and
reality are intersubjectively constituted:
For things this means that several subjects – in which each taken individ-
ually constitutes a nature of corresponding systems of perspectival repre-
sentations [perspektivischen Darstellungen] – step into empathy, and when
this is carried out, they are related to the same nature and find themselves
mutually in possession not only of the same nature but the same oriented
nature, the same system of perspectival appearances with the same shape
and content. (Husserl b, )
In Husserl’s transcendental perspective, the objectivity of the world and
intersubjectivity belong together. On the one hand, the constitution of
objectivity requires a form of basic intersubjectivity. Even when a subject is
alone, it experiences the objective world as a perspectival system of appear-
ances and, hence, as publicly available. This means that the objective world
is necessarily shareable, even though this shareability may not be actualised
right now (or perhaps ever). On the other hand, all forms of intersubjec-
tivity seem to presuppose the fundamental form of intersubjectivity that
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
comes with the relation to the world. Empathy, for instance, presupposes a
sense of the world as a realm in which the other subject can have a
perspective or be oriented as I can. The act of empathy simply actualises
in flesh and blood what was already a latent possibility of the intersubjec-
tivity that comes with the world – a possibility latent in the experience of
nature as a ‘system of perspectival representations’ that serves as the
correlate for each subject.
The awareness of a foreign body ‘over there’ presupposes the intersub-
jective objectivity of a common world, since I cannot make sense of what it
means for somebody to be ‘over there’, if I have no understanding of what
it means for a self-same object to have multiple (possible) aspects and,
hence, already carry within itself an ‘internal horizon’ of potential experi-
ences (e.g., Husserl , ). Accordingly, I do not take the other’s
stream of experience to be something unintelligible, even if I cannot access
it from the first-person perspective. Rather, I understand it as something
directed towards another aspect of the world that lies between us:
I do not grasp the series of appearances, that I put into [einlege] the other, as
different but rather as the same that I might have. The perception that the
other has according to my empathy actualises the same manner of appear-
ance [Erscheinungsweise] that is also there for me, but which I do not
currently have. (Husserl b, )
The world thus provides a unitary system of perspectival appearances, and
in this very idea of ‘perspectives’ and, hence, the very category of objec-
tivity that ensures the unity between such ‘perspectives’, lies already
dormant the transcendental others that the ego necessarily posits. As in
the quote above, the ego is a ‘primordial monad that intentionally carries
other monads within itself’ (Husserl c, ).
To be sure, this does not prove the actual existence of others. The claim
is transcendental insofar as it is a necessary condition of possibility for the
experience of transcendence in the sense of objectivity, that is, transcen-
dence in the sense that something is not given to my mind alone. Whether
or not someone is actually there to perceive the world with me is a different
matter. Even if a universal plague were to extinguish everyone but me, this
still would not change ‘the natural world-sense, [as] “experienceable by
everyone”’ (Husserl , ).
We cannot understand intersubjectivity without appealing to a consti-
tutive relation to the world, and vice versa, we cannot understand the
world without reference to intersubjectivity. The same is true for subjec-
tivity, axiomatically, since subjectivity is nothing but the dative of
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
manifestation. Echoing Heidegger’s threefold distinction between the self-,
with-, and surrounding world, Zahavi concludes that ‘I, we, and world
ultimately form a unity, and are abstract if regarded on their own’ and that
‘none of the three elements can be reduced to any one of the others’
(Zahavi , ).
Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity is transcendental as he claims that
there is a necessary relation between intersubjectivity and transcendence.
He claims, furthermore, that there are several distinct layers of intersub-
jectivity that are in an internal hierarchy of foundation. Using the name
‘open intersubjectivity’ for the intersubjectivity inherent to world consti-
tution and horizontal intentionality, we can now see how Husserl’s two
paths to intersubjectivity differ from each other. The first takes empathy to
be the most fundamental layer, while the second argues that the internal
hierarchy of foundation is: () open intersubjectivity, () empathy, and ()
culture (Husserl , ff ). Open intersubjectivity makes empathy
possible, even though empathy constitutes a mode of intersubjectivity that
is irreducible to the transcendental references to others that characterise
open intersubjectivity. Empathy, in turn, makes possible more complex
forms of intersubjectivity where we experience the world in accordance
with different cultures. At this level, we find Husserl’s generative phenom-
enology and our embeddedness in the different layers of the lifeworld as it
is known from the distinction between home-world and foreign-world
(cf. Steinbock ).
The Husserlian argument that open intersubjectivity is necessary for the
constitution of the objective world and a precondition of empathy obvi-
ously brings him closer to Heidegger, who, in his own way, considers
transcendence to be necessarily linked to sociality. In fact, some commen-
tators argue that the two approaches are compatible. Zahavi notes that
Heidegger is close to Husserl’s position when arguing that being-with is a
condition of possibility for both self-understanding and world-
understanding, even though Zahavi finds it unclear whether being-with
is identical with open intersubjectivity or the higher-order intersubjectivity
of a specific cultural world (Zahavi , ff ). Overgaard, who largely
agrees with Zahavi’s characterisation of Husserl’s transcendental intersub-
jectivity, believes that being-with is on par with open intersubjectivity and
that Husserl’s conception of the objective world is compatible with
Heidegger’s concept of the world as a referential or relational whole qua
the transcendental references to others inherent to horizontal intentional-
ity (Overgaard , –). Tom Nenon, like Overgaard, sees a
similarity between Heidegger’s and Husserl’s conceptions of the world,
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
especially once we take into account that most of Husserl’s analyses serve a
specific transcendental purpose and compare Heidegger’s practical
embeddedness within a cultural and social world with the account of
everydayness given in Ideas II (Nenon , see also Merleau-Ponty
, viii; Theunissen , ).
This will serve as a preliminary indication of the similarities between the
two accounts, but a decisive answer to the questions whether being-with
corresponds to open intersubjectivity and whether Husserl’s conception of
a layered lifeworld is compatible with Heidegger’s concept of the world
requires a closer look at Heidegger’s critique of Husserl and an evaluation
of what exactly is at stake in his concept of transcendence.

. From Transcendental Subjectivity to Existential Selfhood

Despite these similarities, Heidegger does not hold Husserl’s analysis of
intersubjectivity in high esteem. This is partly because Heidegger mainly
considers Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity to be an empathy theory and
partly because he deems Husserl’s general interest in the issue of world
constitution to be motivated by a Cartesian quest for certainty.
In his comments on Ideas II, Heidegger argues that Husserl’s personal-
istic attitude is a step in the right direction, since it poses the question
about the human being as a full and concrete person, as a distinct individual
characterised by concrete beliefs, attitudes, and motivations shaped by his
or her social life. Yet, Heidegger believes that Husserl’s general approach
remains stuck within a Cartesian framework. For this reason, it ‘serves to
obstruct the question . . . of the being of the intentional’ even when it is
amended through the personalistic attitude (GA, /).
More specifically, the problem is that Husserl does not reflect on the
way that the transcendental subject is not only the subject to whom
phenomena are given but also necessarily embedded within the world in
a specific way. In Heidegger’s view, Husserl believes that the transcenden-
tal attitude can somehow rid itself of our worldly concerns in order to
account for world constitution from a pure and disinterested perspective.
The personalistic attitude becomes, then, only an amendment (designed
for the humanities) to the transcendental attitude that remains the truly
philosophical point of departure. Taking issue with the separation between
the philosophising subject and the human being who lives in the everyday
world, Heidegger argues that being can only manifest itself to an entity
that is both ontic and ontological. As we recall from SZ, ‘Dasein is ontically
distinctive in that it is ontological’ (SZ, /).
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
Phenomenological ontology must hence provide an analysis of existence
as the particular ontic–ontological mode of being of the human. This
makes the concrete or factical human life, including the social dimension
of such life, the point of departure of Heidegger’s phenomenology. This
recasting of phenomenology has wide-ranging consequences for
Heidegger’s description of human ‘subjectivity’ but also ‘intersubjectivity’.
In a lecture course from , Heidegger summarises his critique of
Husserl in three points:
We must take into account () that this reflection stays in the wake of the
question of the constitution of reality and objectivity; () that the mode of
access to the person is nothing other than the already defined immanent
reflection (inspectio sui) upon lived experiences, from which all the theses of
absolute givenness and the like are derived; () that the predetermination of
the unity of the connection of experiences [Erlebniszusammenhang] as spirit
and person adheres to the traditional definition of man – homo animal
rationale – as its guide. (GA, f/)
If we go through them one by one it is possible to see not only the
contours of Heidegger’s revised vision for phenomenology but also how
these admittedly cursory remarks are in part motivated by social ontolog-
ical concerns.
() ‘This reflection stays in the wake of the question of the constitution
of reality and objectivity’.
Following the interpretation above, Heidegger recognises that Husserl’s
main interest is the constitution of reality and objectivity and that what-
ever interests he has in the concrete person is subordinated to this over-
arching problem. In Heidegger’s summary, Ideas I concerns itself with the
reality [Realität] of entities. Correspondingly, the dative of manifestation is
taken to simply be the correlate of the experience of such reality. ‘[T]he
unity of the stream of lived experience is to be defined as a unity of a
comprehended objective manifold’ (GA, /).
The thematic of Ideas I, however, still determines the sequence of
questions in Ideas II in such a way that the question of the person is
subordinated to the question of reality or nature. So, even though Husserl
does not explicitly describe the personalistic attitude as something less
important than the issue of what constitutes reality and objectivity, he still
ends up with a layered account that attempts to explain the different
functions of everyday life but does so by presupposing that these functions
are higher-order phenomena built upon a basic layer consisting of ‘natural’
or ‘real’ entities: ‘The fundamental layer is still the naturally real
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
[Naturwirkliche], upon which the psychic [das Seelische] is built, and upon
the psychic the spiritual [das Geistige]’ (GA, /).
The claim is thus that Husserl incorporates non-phenomenological or
indeed naturalistic assumptions into his ontology (e.g., GA, /).
Contrary to the spirit of the epoché, priority is given not to how things are
given in experience, but how they must be for a disinterested and theo-
retical act of perception: ‘Being for Husserl means nothing other than true
being, objectivity, true for a theoretical scientific knowing’ (GA, /).
If, as Zahavi argues, Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity does not mean
to account for the appearance of others in flesh and blood but rather tries
to show how intersubjectivity is necessary for constituting the categories of
objectivity, transcendence, and reality, the description of sociality that
follows from this is predetermined to give priority to the objects that
reveal themselves to a theoretical perception. Even if we try to construct
further social ontological layers on top of this basis, our analysis has already
answered the basic question of phenomenological social ontology, How is
sociality given?, by subjugating it to another question, How is objectivity
given? While this second question might be the primary question for
Husserl, Heidegger thinks that it springs from an implicit Cartesianism
that undermines and often even contradicts the phenomenological evi-
dence. ‘The being of the person is not as such experienced in a primary
way’ (GA, /).
In his remarks, Heidegger implicitly poses a phenomenological chal-
lenge to any layer ontology by arguing that layer ontologies lead to
hierarchies of foundation and that hierarchies of foundation tend to grant
priority to the natural world (whether in the phenomenological sense of
constituted objectivity or the naturalist sense of basic, mind-independent
facts). Layer ontologies thereby borrow not only its essential categories but
also its basic premises from what Heidegger would call an occurrent
ontology. From a phenomenological ontological point of view, however,
this is not how things are. In everyday life, things are given as useful and


It is controversial whether Husserl’s phenomenology amounts to an occurrent ontology. Overgaard
argues against this by pointing out that ‘“thing”, “substance”, “nature”, and the like, as well as such
concepts as “property”, and “attribute”,’ cannot be used to describe transcendental subjectivity, since
transcendental subjectivity is the ‘source (Quellpunkt) of all that these concepts apply to; it is the
place that allows for things of nature, for substances with properties, to manifest themselves’
(Overgaard , ). Transcendental subjectivity is not an entity, and for this reason it
admittedly makes little sense to claim that it is occurrent. Heidegger’s point is, however, more
subtle than this. In fact, Overgaard’s objection underlines the problem. The fact that transcendental
subjectivity is the ‘the place that allows for things of nature, for substances with properties, to
manifest themselves’ reveals that transcendental subjectivity, despite not being an occurrent entity
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
valuable within social practices. In Heidegger’s view we are, hence, forced
to either give up the (naturalistic or Cartesian) priority given to the
‘naturally real’ or the phenomenological ambition of staying true to ‘the
things themselves’. Husserl, in Heidegger’s interpretation, gives up
the latter.
() ‘The mode of access to the person is nothing other than the already
defined immanent reflection (inspectio sui) upon lived experiences,
from which all the theses of absolute givenness and the like
are derived’.
Heidegger then shifts his focus from the constituted reality to the consti-
tuting subject. He argues that instead of considering the ‘being of the
person’ in a phenomenologically sound way – that is, as it is experienced in
everyday life – Husserl’s reliance on the concepts of the pure consciousness
and the pure ego immediately leads him astray.
A remark from Husserl’s  lecture ‘Phenomenology and
Anthropology’ serves as a case in point. ‘Becoming aware of myself as this
[transcendental] ego through the transcendental reduction, I have achieved
a standpoint above all worldly being [weltlichen Sein], above my own
being-human and human life’ (Husserl , ). The reduction, he
says, requires that we abstract from all personal matters and all social
engagement and achieve ‘transcendental solitude’ (Husserl , ).
Heidegger takes issue with this emphasis on purity and solitude and
claims that it prevents Husserl from grasping the being of the human
being. The abstraction implied by the pure ego requires that we bracket all
the aspects that serve to make human existence what it is. Reflections on
the pure ego are essential to the question of how nature is constituted, but
they cannot help us clarify ‘consciousness’ as individuated or individual
(GA, /), that is, as a concrete human being defined by what and
who it cares for.
In Heidegger’s reading, Husserl offers two different solutions to the
problem of personal individuation, an extrinsic and an intrinsic solution,
that both fail.
The extrinsic solution is described in the following way: ‘[N]ow the
theme is not pure consciousness and pure ego but instead the individuated
[verenzelt] and individual [individuelle]. But the individuation is always

itself, leads to an occurrent ontology. The transcendental ego is implicitly positioned over and
against a world of occurrents objects by the attempt to describe entities as ‘objective,’ that is, as
correlates of disinterested, theoretical acts.
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
conditioned by the body [Leib]’ (GA, /). In this reading, Husserl
might try to account for the individuation of the transcendental ego by
reference to how the lived body acts as a locus of experience, both as a
constituted object of experience but also as itself constituting various
experiences, like kinaesthetics. The problem is that this appeal to embodi-
ment remains a layered account of the human being, where the body is
assumed to be the foundational layer, like the naturally real (spatiotempo-
ral extension) was assumed to be the foundational layer of constituted
reality. Thereby individuation is assumed to be independent of personal
and social features. These features only enter at a later and less fundamen-
tal level. Husserl thus conceives of the human being as a unity of three
different layers in an internal hierarchy of foundation: the physical, the
psychic, and the spiritual (GA, /). Heidegger’s challenge, on the
contrary, is to grasp the being and unity of the human being. This requires
that we take into account practical engagement and affective involvement
with the environment and others from the get-go; that is, that we conceive
embodiment as a part of (rather than the basis of ) existential selfhood.
Heidegger then looks at the second option, namely, the intrinsic
solution:
Of course, it is explicitly stated that the connection of experiences
[Erlebniszusammenhang] has its intrinsic individuation [Individuation], that
it is always had by a particular I-subject, but the type of being of the acts
remains undetermined. Acts are performed; the I is the pole of the acts, the
self-persisting subject. (GA, /)
A form of individuation is intrinsic to the immanent reflection on lived
experiences since all of these experiences are had by the same I. From this
perspective, the subject is grasped as the formal unity of the mind afforded
by the transcendental subject as the synthesising activity that unites
distinct intentional states in a single series. In the contemporary debate,
this solution to the problem of individuation is defended by Zahavi, who
calls it the ‘minimal’ or ‘experiential self’. Within the very structure of
intentionality, we find ‘a distinct but formal kind of experiential individ-
uation’ that is, pace Heidegger, ‘not concerned with issues like personality,
character, preferences, and history’ (Zahavi , ).
In Heidegger’s view, this is not the right level of description. All minded
creatures are minimal selves, on Husserl’s and Zahavi’s account, and
although this can indeed explain the asymmetry in how we can access
our own intentional states in the first-person but not that of others, we are
still unable to explain what makes me me and you you. Sara Heinämaa
explains it thus:
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
Essentially, Heidegger’s critical remarks here suggest that the immanent
principle of individuation that Husserl presents can merely distinguish the
reflecting ego from everything else but cannot differentiate between sepa-
rate individuals in the experienced plurality of human life. On purely
immanent grounds, we can only keep ourselves distinct from everything
alien or from a general anonymous other without ever coming to You, He,
She, etc. (Heinämaa , )
As a formal unity of mind, the minimal self abstracts from all our worldly
engagements and will not help us individuate human beings as full and
concrete persons. It can only pick out the I independently of its worldly
engagement and contrast this I to all others, who are conceived indiscrim-
inately as non-I’s.
Underlying this critique is, of course, Heidegger’s alternative account of
existential selfhood. On this account, the self is not the ‘self-persisting
subject’ but an agent engaged in worldly projects, constantly drawn in by
the possibilities of the world. Dasein is ‘primarily being-possible
[Möglichsein]’; it ‘is in every case what it can be, and the way in which it
is its possibility’ (SZ, /). For Heidegger, to be a self is to be self-
referentially committed to a project that can be furthered through certain
affordances. As Wrathall puts it with reference to Merleau-Ponty, the self
is a ‘particular polarization of affordances into solicitations’ (Wrathall
, ). The minimal self is not itself at stake in the factical situations
that appear to it, whereas the existential self is the very feature – the for-
the-sake-of – that polarises such situations into wholes of significance. This
means that Heidegger’s notion of selfhood is ultimately individuated by its
pre-reflective, conative, and affective engagement in the world; by its
existential projections. Traditional notions of embodiment and minimal
selfhood wrongfully abstract from this kind of practical involvement.
() ‘The predetermination of the unity of the connection of experiences
as spirit and person adheres to the traditional definition of man –
homo animal rationale – as its guide’.
Heidegger now goes on to argue that Husserl’s layered account of reality
and subjectivity not only prevents him from answering ‘the question about
the being of the full and concrete human being’ (GA, /) but also
reveal that Husserl proceeds in an unphenomenological way by borrowing
categories and premises from traditional metaphysics:


See Rousse () for a further discussion of minimal selfhood and existential selfhood.
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
Can this being [of the full, concrete human being] be, so to speak,
assembled from the being of the material substrate, of the body, and from
the soul and the spirit? Is the being of the person the product of the kinds of
being of these layers of being? Or is it just here where it becomes evident
that this way of a prior division and a subsequent composition does not get
at the phenomena? (GA, /)
[I]s this definition drawn from experiences which aim at a primary experi-
ence of the being of man? Or does it not come from the experience of man
as an occurrent thing of the world – animal – which has reason – rationale –
as an intrinsic property? (GA, /)
The charge is that Husserl is unable to provide a phenomenology of the
human being because his interest in the constitution of objectivity forces
him to conceptualise the human being as a ‘multilayered thing of the
world’ (GA, /). He is thereby incapable of dealing with the
problems inherent to the traditional definition of the human being as
animal rationale and as body, soul, and spirit because he simply cannot
account for how these layers fit together and form an ontological unity.
The problem of the personalistic attitude thus echoes the problem of
naturalism, even though they were supposed to be opposite extremes
(GA, /f ): How does soul and spirit, mental world and the social
world, relate to the objectivity of the natural world?
In this way, Heidegger’s critique of Husserl echoes the problem outlined
in Chapter . While Husserl does indeed provide rich analyses of social
life, he fails to realise that social ontology is a dimension of phenomeno-
logical ontology as such and not just a single layer or a single region
of existence.
Husserl’s transcendental social ontology is right to emphasise that
sociality has an essential relation to transcendence, and his ambition of
accounting for this relation through an analysis of experience is correct
despite the fact that he never, in Heidegger’s opinion, manages to carry out
such an analysis. The main problem, on the other hand, is that Husserl’s
‘idea of absolute and rigorous science [Wissenschaftlichkeit]’ (GA, /
) prevents him from adequately grasping the correlation between
(inter)subjectivity and transcendence. He sees the human being primarily
as the pure impersonal ego and transcendence as objective reality: Husserl’s
position ‘certainly does not take the human as a reality of nature
[Naturrealität], but it is still a reality of the world [Weltrealität] that
constitutes itself as transcendence in absolute consciousness’ (GA, /).
The question of the human being is not only a regional problem, not
simply a question of how we understand the ontological domain of
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
humans. On the contrary, the issue goes to the very heart of the phenom-
enological project insofar as Heidegger’s critique puts into question
Husserl’s concept of transcendental subjectivity.
As we saw above, the general idea underlying Heidegger’s charges is that
the phenomenological subject, as the one to whom the world is given, must
also simultaneously be an entity in the world. In his terms, the phenome-
nological subject must be both ontological and ontic.
How is it at all possible that this sphere of absolute position, pure con-
sciousness, which is supposed to be separated from every transcendence by
an absolute gulf, is at the same time united with reality in the unity of a real
human being, who himself occurs as a real object in the world? How is it
possible that lived experiences constitute an absolute and pure region
of being and at the same time occur in the transcendence of the world?
(GA, /)
Husserl himself recognised the significance of the challenge posed by
Heidegger. Responding to the popularity of SZ, he explicitly argued
against Heidegger’s position, as he understood it, in the  lecture
mentioned above. He never mentions Heidegger by name but he does
comment on the new type of phenomenology according to which ‘the true
foundation of philosophy must lie . . . solely in the human being, namely,
in an essential doctrine [Wesenslehre] concerning its concrete, worldly
being-there [konkret-weltlichen Daseins]’ (Husserl , ). Husserl
believes that this turn to anthropologism or psychologism, as he deroga-
torily calls it, exhibits a ‘subjectivistic tendency’ in direct opposition to his
own transcendental and scientific ambition (Husserl , ).
Husserl argues that if we presuppose the validity of the world, we fall
back into a kind of metaphysical naïveté because we cannot live up to the
truly philosophical task of grounding the sciences. The problem with
Heidegger’s insistence on the ontic–ontological status of Dasein is, hence,
that any positive doctrine of the human being ‘whether empirical or a
priori presupposes the existing or possible existing world’ (Husserl ,
). If the phenomenologising subject does not achieve transcendental
solitude, it is unable to describe the necessary structures of its experiential
field as it remains steeped in contingency. A phenomenology conducted by
an innerworldly entity rather than the transcendental subject remains,
therefore, a mere regional ontology of limited philosophical interest
(Husserl , ).
In assessing Husserl’s critique, it is important to remember that
Heidegger’s primary interest is not to ground the sciences and not to
account for the objectivity of the world. In Heidegger’s view, the sciences
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
do just fine without such a Cartesian quest for certainty. Instead, he aims
to pose the question of being, and this question can only be worked out
from the perspective of an entity that always already moves within a
(however vague) understanding of being (SZ, /).
We can outline Heidegger’s approach in two steps:
() To grasp being, we must clarify how entities appear.
() To clarify how entities appear, we must analyse the kind of entity to
which (or rather to whom) entities appear.
The second step is important since the kind of entity to whom appearances
are given determine how these appearances are given. Chad Engelland puts
this point nicely when he says that ‘[t]o be given, being needs a dative, and
to be a dative, one needs to be an entity’ (Engelland , ). This makes
clear why it is crucial for Heidegger that we abandon Husserl’s distinction
between human being (as a constituted entity) and the transcendental ego
(as the constituting subject). This distinction denies () by splitting the
appearances of entities from the concrete being of the entity to whom
entities appear. It follows from Heidegger’s premises that
() To grasp being, we must analyse the kind of entity to which (or
rather to whom) entities appear, namely, Dasein.
As he puts it in SZ, phenomenology is transcendental but also
hermeneutical:
[T]o the extent that by uncovering the meaning of being and the basic
structures of Dasein in general we may exhibit the horizon for any further
ontological study of those entities which do not have the character of
Dasein, this hermeneutic also becomes a ‘hermeneutic’ in the sense of
working out the conditions on which the possibility of any ontological
investigation depends. (SZ, /)
Had Husserl taken Heidegger’s ‘anthropological’ approach to phenome-
nology seriously, he would have realised that the dative of manifestation
cannot be understood as a series of disinterested acts of constitution (with
or without an internal hierarchy of foundation), that the transcendental
subject cannot be clearly distinguished from the concrete human being.
Heidegger’s hermeneutic point is that the dative of manifestation is an
entity with a particular mode of being and that this, in turn, gives
manifestation itself a particular shape. In SZ, this thesis is famously
substantiated with the further claim that the being of the entity to whom
entities appear is care in the form of ecstatic temporality. In contrast to
Husserl’s disinterested observer, Heidegger grounds phenomenology in the
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
temporal unity of Dasein as an existential self, that is, a self that is
practically engaged in and affectively attuned by the world that it shares
with others.

. Transcendence, Facticity, and Individuation

Given his rejection of the separation between factical life and transcen-
dental subject, we must clarify in which sense Heidegger’s revised phe-
nomenology remains transcendental. Many commentators worry that his
hermeneutic insistence that factical life is the point of departure of phe-
nomenology effectively undermines his transcendental ambitions. Charles
Guignon, for instance, argues that the ambition to uncover ontological
structures that are ‘applicable in all cultures and historical epochs’ rests
uneasily with the hermeneutical thesis that ‘any inquiry must be seen as
relative to the culture and historical period in which it is thrown’ (Guignon
, ). Guignon’s worry hinges on a distinction similar to Husserl’s
distinction between the transcendental subject, which can grasp the nec-
essary structures of its own experiential life, and the mundane human
being caught up in contingent, worldly affairs, although they approach the
distinction from opposing sides, so to speak.
On the one hand, we have the transcendental, the necessary, and the a
priori. On the other hand, we have the factical, the contingent, and the
empirical. These two sides seem to be in tension. When Heidegger
famously claims that the project in SZ is indeed transcendental, he even
seems to underline this very tension:
Being is the transcendens as such. And the transcendence of Dasein’s being is
distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most
radical individuation [Individuation]. Every disclosure of being as the trans-
cendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness
of being) is veritas transcendentalis. (SZ, /)
He states in no uncertain terms that his project must lead to transcendental
knowledge if it is to succeed. But he then proceeds to claim that ‘the
transcendence of Dasein’s being is distinctive in that it implies the possi-
bility and the necessity of the most radical individuation’. How can he
insist on both a transcendental description – a universal account of the
conditions of possibility of being-in-the-world – and that transcendence
necessarily implies the most radical individuation, which must mean that it
takes its point of departure in and ultimately sheds light on our concrete
existence? To answer these questions, we must take a closer look at
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
Heidegger’s concept of transcendence. This will also help us finally locate
the points of divergence between his and Husserl’s vision of transcendental
social ontology.
For Heidegger, the issue of transcendence is neither the question of
objectivity nor the problem of how a subject gets access to an object. ‘We
must ask’, he says, ‘What makes it ontologically possible for entities to be
encountered within-the-world and objectified as so encountered? This can
be answered by recourse to the transcendence of the world – a transcen-
dence with an ecstatic-horizonal foundation’ (SZ, /f ). The term
transcendence refers, hence, to being-in-the-world, that is, the very open-
ing of a temporally structured experiential field. It is the underlying
structure that makes intentional relations possible in the first place, rather
than an issue of how objectivity is constituted, as it is for Husserl.
In one sense, Heidegger uses the term transcendence in a very tradi-
tional way. Transcendence, he says, is a ‘surpassing’, a ‘stepping-over’ or a
‘stepping across’ (GA, /; GA, /f ). What is surpassed in
transcendence is, however, not the realm of the sensible, not the contin-
gent in direction of the eternal, and not the gap that separates subject from
object. Transcendence surpasses all ‘entities, among which Dasein also
factically is . . . Objects are surpassed in advance; more exactly, entities are
surpassed and can subsequently become objects’ (GA, /).
Transcendence is the primordial surpassing of entities towards the struc-
ture that makes them intelligible; it is the surpassing of entities towards the
world (GA, /). Transcendence names the phenomenological
correlation between mind and world, and the investigation of this corre-
lation is rightly called transcendental:
We name world that toward which Dasein as such transcends, and shall now
determine transcendence as being-in-the-world. World co-constitutes
[macht. . . mit aus] the unitary structure of transcendence; as belonging
to this structure, the concept of world may be called transcendental.
(GA, /)
Thus, Heidegger’s concept of transcendence refers to the relationality of
always already being ‘out there’ among things and with people. However,
Dasein is not ‘out there’ as an occurrent object placed next to others. It is
‘out there’ in the sense of being actively engaged. Dasein ‘surpasses’ entities
in disclosing them within an affectively and conatively charged
experiential field.
For Heidegger, to be a subject, to be Dasein, is simply to transcend:
‘Dasein is itself the surpassing [Überschritt]’ (GA, /).
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
Transcendence is, therefore, neither a cognitive achievement nor an act of
will or faith. It is ‘the primordial constitution of the subjectivity of a
subject’ (GA, /), although we should be careful to note that this
does not entail that transcendence is something subjective. ‘In the end, the
concept of world must indeed be conceived in such a way that world is
indeed subjective, i.e., belongs to Dasein, but precisely on this account
does not fall, as an entity, into the inner sphere of a “subjective” subject’
(GA, /). Phenomenologically, to be a subject is to exist in an
experiential field as the one to whom experiences are given. The ‘subjec-
tive’ is, accordingly, not something internal to the mind, not something
immanent. Dasein is always already engaged with entities, both instru-
mentally and socially, and it makes no sense to speak of it as ‘subjective’ if
this means that we must abstract from these worldly relations. Conversely,
to be an object is to be given to someone in an experiential field (GA,
/). If there is no such field – if there is no transcendence and
therefore no Dasein – entities do not appear as objects. ‘Innerworldliness
does not belong to the essence of occurrent things as such, but is only the
transcendental condition, in the primordial sense, for the possibility of
occurrent objects being able to emerge as they are’ (GA, /). As
Crowell puts it, ‘[t]he ‘nature’ of naturalistic accounts is . . . immanent to
being-in-the-world’ (Crowell , ). Transcendence is, hence, onto-
logically prior to the distinction between the subject and the object. That
is to say, mind and world are necessarily correlated in such a way that the
mind is intrinsically world-directed and -engaged, while the world is
phenomenologically senseless apart from the mind.
Heidegger presents his concept of transcendence as a critique of Husserl
and repeatedly states that transcendence makes intentionality possible and
not the other way around (e.g., GA, /; GA, /, GA, /
). He thus intends to go one step further than Husserl’s analysis of
intentionality. I agree with Dermot Moran when he writes that
Heidegger is criticising Husserl and his phenomenological followers for not
really offering an analysis of the nature of the transcendental ‘correlation’
between noesis and noema in the intentional relation. Heidegger wants to
make the correlation itself thematic. (Moran , )
While this formulation sounds rather innocent, it is crucial to note that
Heidegger’s attempt to make the correlation ‘thematic’ must seem heavily
loaded from a Husserlian perspective. It lies, after all, in direct continua-
tion of his insistence that there should be no gap between transcendental
subject and the mundane human being, between transcendence
and facticity.
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
As we saw in the quote above, Heidegger achieves this by showing that
transcendence – as the structure on which intentionality rests – is an
‘ecstatic-horizonal foundation’ (SZ, /f ). While nested in a foot-
note, this claim reiterates the central thesis of SZ in a way that underlines
his disagreement with Husserl. The idea that transcendence is ecstatic-
horizonal implies that all intentional states operate according to the same
temporal structure. Heidegger uses the term ‘temporal’ to refer to the
existential unity of the past (thrownness/affectivity), future (projection/
understanding), and the present (fallenness/absorption). In short, this
means that Dasein is futurally oriented towards certain projected possibil-
ities determined by its for-the-sake-of, and that these possibilities are
delineated in accord with the situation in which Dasein already finds itself
thrown or affected, and that this structure of thrown-projection forms the
experiential field in which the present entities with which we engage are
disclosed. This structure underlies all intentional attitudes, both percep-
tion and imagination, both theoretical distance and practical absorption
(e.g., SZ, /).
The claim that transcendence makes intentionality possible hinges on
Heidegger’s understanding of intentionality as involving the a as b-struc-
ture (say, a hammer as something to be hammered with or as something to
be weighed). This requires, he argues, that we are already familiar with a
network of relations (e.g., the relations between hammer, nails, and wood
or between mass, gravitation, and force). The thematic understanding of a
as b only makes sense within a previously disclosed world. As we have just
seen, the world is temporally structured. Based on the prior familiarity with
a network of relations, I disclose present entities in light of the future
possibilities they open up for me. As ecstatic temporality, transcendence
is the ontological ground of intentionality.
What does this tell us about the relation between transcendence and
facticity? In one place, Heidegger notes that the concepts of world and
transcendence have a ‘peculiarly universal [eigentümlich universalen] char-
acter’ that is ‘essentially related to human Dasein’ (GA, /). This
‘peculiar universality’ consists in the fact that transcendence – as another
name for the opening of a temporally structured experiential field – is by
necessity factical or finite and, hence, relative to each Dasein. As he
explains, ‘Dasein’s facticity is such that its being-in-the-world has always
dispersed [zerstreut] itself or even split itself up into particular ways of
being-in’ (SZ, /). Our surpassing entities towards the world always
take place in a particular or finite way. Transcendence never affords a pure
and disinterested point of view; rather, the world appears to an agent who
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
finds him- or herself practically, affectively, and socially engaged in specific
projects. Facticity implies that Dasein ‘can understand itself as bound up
in its “destiny” [Geschick] with the being of those entities which it
encounters within its own world’ (SZ, /). It ensures that Dasein, as
the continuous thrown-projection of possibilities, ‘remains in the throw
[im Wurf bleibt]’ (SZ, /). In sum, transcendence is always factically
configured or fulfilled.
We can now see why transcendence ‘implies the possibility and the
necessity of the most radical individuation’ (SZ, /). Transcendence is
factically configured because it establishes a field of possibilities; it indi-
viduates Dasein because Dasein is the self inherent to such a field of
possibilities. ‘Transcendence constitutes selfhood’ (GA, /) but it
does so holistically by disclosing ‘entities that Dasein “itself” is not’
(GA, /). The individuation achieved in transcendence is, in other
words, a function of the structure of care. Dasein is what it is by virtue
of what it cares for and how it cares, and transcendence is nothing but
the holistic structure – between self, world, and others – configured
through care.
Let me illustrate this connection between transcendence and Dasein’s
individuation. Transcendence is Dasein’s way of being ‘out there’ by virtue
of its existential projection of possibilities. If I play tennis, for instance,
I navigate the tennis court by pursuing possibilities of returning the ball, of
smashing, and so on. I am usually not conscious of myself as generating
these possibilities (through, e.g., conscious deliberation or acts of volition).
Indeed, transcendence refers to the way that the tennis court already makes
sense to me in a certain way; the way in which it is already available as a
particular field of possibilities. Transcendence implies individuation and
constitutes selfhood because there is a sense of self inherent to this field of
possibilities. Thus, when playing tennis, I am not a self by virtue of self-
reflection or some other thematic awareness of myself. Rather, I engage in
what Dreyfus calls fluid or skilful coping; I am fully immersed in the game.
This immersion contains a phenomenological understanding of what it is
to be a self because I can only immerse myself in this way on account of a
tacit and backgrounded for-the-sake relation, that is, a reference to myself
as the one for whom these forces are significant in such and such a way.
The existential self is, hence, reflected back to me by the factical possibil-
ities opened up in transcendence. In playing tennis, I am tacitly and pre-
reflectively aware of myself as responding to certain solicitations on the
court. Now, the self thus disclosed is individuated neither by its
embodiment as such nor by its formal unity of mind but by the things
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
that it cares for, by the way that the world reveals itself to it by way of
certain possibilities.
In contrast, as we saw in the previous section, Husserl’s solution to the
problem of personal individuation either opposed my lived body to all
other bodies in my perceptual field in a non-discriminate way or opposed
my consciousness, as the only one to which I have first-personal access, to
that of all others in a non-discriminate way since I can only have a ‘non-
primordial’ access to these (to borrow a term from Stein ). Since his
concept of individuation accounts for our everyday, practical involvement
with the world in the form of our existential projections, Heidegger
believes that he has provided what Husserl could not, namely, an onto-
logical account of the full and concrete human being.
Let us now return to Guignon’s worry that transcendental ontological
claims concerning the universal structures of being-in-the-world are
incompatible with the notion of facticity. We can now see that
Heidegger has this tension in mind when he describes transcendence and
the transcendental concept of world as ‘peculiarly universal’ and as ‘always
dispersed [zerstreut] . . . into particular ways of being-in’. The decisive issue
is whether the fact that Dasein can only approach its own ontological
structure by investigating itself in its facticity is compatible with its alleged
ability to distinguish between the necessary and the contingent features of
its being. Guignon believes that necessary claims about Dasein can only be
made from a ‘standpoint that is freed from the constraints of a particular
language and culture’ (Guignon , ), that is, from what John
McDowell calls a ‘sideways-on’ perspective (e.g., McDowell , f ).
This argument fails for several reasons. First, Heidegger’s transcendental
claims do not require a sideways-on perspective since he is not making
claims about necessity tout court, that is, not making traditional claims
about metaphysical necessity. This would, indeed, contradict his concept of
finitude. Rather, he makes claims about what we might call transcendental
phenomenological necessity of the form: p is necessary for the type of
experience characteristic of an entity D. Correspondingly if p is not


In Chapters  and , I show that this structure not only individuates the I as a particular person
opposed to all others but also makes our understanding of others and their existential projections
possible. Along these lines, to experience the tennis court as a field of possibilities not only provides
me with a pre-reflective self-awareness but also a pre-reflective other-awareness, because I also
encounter the other – my opponent – as immersed in and responding to the same field of forces
in his own way.

There are, of course, other problems inherent to this account of individuation. I deal with two of
them in Chapter .
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
necessary to explain its type of experience, the entity in question is not D.
Specifically, Heidegger claims that transcendence in the form of a tempo-
rally structured experiential field is indispensable if we are to explain
intentionality, that is, the factical experience of a as b. Borrowing a
topographical analogy from Malpas, we can say that Heidegger’s transcen-
dental attempt to uncover the fundamental structure of experience is akin
to trying to map a region (Malpas , ). Why indeed should this
endeavour be impossible from within this region itself? Given that what is
at stake is the necessary structure of D’s experiential life, it seems to me that
this type of inquiry is radically incompatible with a sideways-on perspec-
tive. We have no choice but to proceed from within.
This problem relates to what Wayne Martin () has called the
‘semantics’ of Dasein. Martin argues that our view on what fixes the
meaning of the term Dasein has wide-ranging implications for our con-
ception of what it is to do phenomenological ontology. If, for instance, we
define Dasein intensionally, for example, as the entity that comports itself
towards its own being, it is difficult to see how concrete phenomenological
descriptions might justify necessary and transcendental claims, since only
the truths that follow analytically from this intensional definition of
Dasein are by necessity true for Dasein. It seems that phenomenological
descriptions can only uncover contingent features of (a particular) Dasein,
while all necessary features must be analytically derived from the definition
of Dasein as the entity that comports itself towards its own being.
Alternatively, if we define Dasein extensionally, for example, as another
name for human beings, phenomenological description of the experiential
life of a human being might justify claims about the necessary truths about
human beings but only if we, from the outset, have assumed that all
human beings are ontologically similar (Martin , ).
Martin rightly points out that these approaches are dead ends. Instead,
Heidegger’s phenomenology seems to rest on what Martin calls an ‘exem-
plar semantics’ in which the meaning of Dasein is fixed by Heidegger’s
literary ostension of himself and the reader, by his suggestion that ‘we are
ourselves the entities to be analysed’ (SZ, /). This means that the
transcendental claims issued by Heidegger are, strictly speaking, neither
necessary truths about all human beings nor analytical truths about the
concept of an understanding of being. Rather, they are necessary truths
about the exemplars subjected to the phenomenological description as well
as any entities that are ontologically similar to these exemplars. As Martin
points out, this means that I, as a phenomenologist, can issue necessary
claims about the ontological structure of myself as well as entities that are
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
ontologically like me, although these claims are necessarily provisional
in the sense that their extension has not been fixed in advance
(Martin , , ). This is another way in which Heidegger’
transcendental phenomenological method is tied to ‘the most radical
individuation’ (SZ, /).
Second, we should note that the apparent tension between the factical
and the transcendental appears all the way through Heidegger’s ontology.
As discussed in Chapter , the distinction between the ontic-existential
sense of world, denoting specific realms of familiarity, and the ontological-
existential sense of world, as the manner of being of all these particular
realms of familiarity, runs parallel to it. It is built into the very core of
Heidegger’s project that we must find an ontological-existential structure
that is common to all worlds in the ontic-existential sense. We might
follow Martin and reply to Guignon that this is the (provisional) result of
our attempt to fix the extension of the ostensive definition of Dasein and
being-in-the-world or we might, in an even more deflationary reading,
argue that the move from the ontic-existential to the ontological-existential
only involves a comparative procedure rather than an actual transcendental
deduction. In both these readings, the universalist ambition is built into
the philosophical project from the outset. Without this, there would
indeed, as Husserl feared and Heidegger denied, be no difference between
phenomenology as a form of philosophy and phenomenology as a method
occasionally used by regional sciences like anthropology. Some hermeneu-
ticists, of course, simply accept this fate (e.g., Caputo ; Rorty ,
; Vattimo , ), but Heidegger certainly did not.
Third, it seems to me that Guignon’s suspicion against universal claims
pulls the rug from under his own feet. From which standpoint does the
hermeneuticist claim that all interpretations are relative to a specific culture
and historical period? Although I cannot argue this point here, I believe
that a consistent hermeneutic itself rests on a, however minimal, transcen-
dental foundation since the proposition ‘All truths are relative to their
historical periods’ must itself be of a different nature than the relative and
historical truths that it describes at pain of being self-refuting. Within his
phenomenological transcendental framework, Heidegger can easily claim
that ‘world-entry has the characteristic of happening [Geschehen], of
history [Geschichte]’, and that ‘world-entry happens when transcendence
happens, i.e., when historical Dasein exists’ (GA, /) since the


This is how I read Dreyfus’ claim that ‘[i]f we can show a structure to be common to the world and
each of its modes, we shall have found the structure of the world as such’ (Dreyfus , ).
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
peculiarly universal structure of transcendence is that it always opens up
factical fields of possibilities. The hermeneuticist who claims that all truths
are relative to their historical periods, on the other hand, struggles to
explain why exactly this proposition should be exempted from his or her
proposed relativism.
Like Husserl, Heidegger aims to describe the necessary structures of
Dasein’s lived experience by way of an a priori analysis. Yet, in contrast to
Husserl, transcendence is not distinct from factical life but designates the
process that opens a horizon of intelligibility in which a holistically
constituted self finds itself locally situated and practically engaged with
things and other people. Heidegger puts the point well in a passage from a
-lecture course:
Dasein is thrown, factical, thoroughly amidst nature through its bodiliness
[Leiblichkeit], and transcendence lies in the fact that these entities, among
which Dasein is and to which Dasein belongs, are surpassed by Dasein. In
other words, as transcending, Dasein is beyond nature, although, as factical,
it remains surrounded by nature. As transcending, i.e., as free, Dasein is
something alien to nature. (GA, /)
As ontological, Dasein is ‘beyond nature’; it transcends entities by
disclosing them within a world. As ontic, however, Dasein remains
‘surrounded by nature’. That is to say, it is itself an entity, and it cannot
separate itself from its factical situatedness in a specific location amongst
other entities that it cares about and with which it is involved in the
pursuit of specific projects. Finally, Dasein is ‘alien to nature’, which
simply means that Dasein is ontologically distinct from the other entities
within the world.
For my present purpose, it is interesting that Heidegger, in his discus-
sion of individuation, not only denies that individuation isolates the I from
the shared world (GA, /) but explicitly claims that the individ-
uation entailed by transcendence serves to make a multiplicity of interre-
lated existential projections possible. As he puts it, this conception of
individuation provides ‘the clarification of the intrinsic possibility of
multiplication [Vermannigfaltigung] which . . . is present in every Dasein
and for which embodiment presents an organising factor’ (GA, /
). As I read these difficult passages, Heidegger’s point is that Dasein, as
a holistically constituted self, is always in relation to other entities (both
objects and other people). This implies that Dasein’s individuation is
always at stake in its existence. Dasein is what it is by virtue of its concrete
field of possibilities, and since these fields of possibilities are always at the
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
brink of changing, so is Dasein’s sense of self. This is one way in which
Dasein harbours within itself the ‘intrinsic possibility of multiplication’.
More importantly, however, Heidegger also argues that ‘multiplicity
[Mannigfaltigkeit] belongs to being itself’ (GA, /). This suggests
that Dasein is not only itself capable of a multiplication (in the sense that
its individuation is constantly at stake for it) but also that our facticity
disperses us into a multiplicity of holistically constituted and, hence,
intrinsically related selves.
To repeat the key points: First, transcendence is always factically con-
figured into the concrete field of possibilities of Dasein’s care, and, second,
this is what individuates Dasein. To be sure, embodiment is, as noted
above, ‘an organising factor’ in this structure but it is not the determining
factor. As ultimately individuated by the care structure, Dasein is neither
necessarily confined to the immanence of its mind (revealed by the
inspectio sui) nor its embodiment (although bodily abilities and location
are bound to affect what we care about) for the simple reason that the
existential self, reflected back by what it cares about, need not refer to the
distinctly minded or embodied individual. As I will argue later, we might
care for something together. Following the argument just sketched, the self
thus individuated is a we that covers several distinctly minded and embod-
ied individuals. Heidegger’s transcendental phenomenology shows that
this form of multiplication is a constitutive or inherent possibility for
Dasein because the existential self is holistically constituted; its under-
standing of itself and the world around it is necessarily responsive to the
behaviour of others. Transcendence involves, as I will detail in the next
chapter, a form of pre-reflective triangulation.

. The Transcendental Status of Being-With

We have seen that Husserl and Heidegger agree that social ontology is a
transcendental endeavour since it must ultimately shed light on the nec-
essary correlation between sociality and transcendence, between coexis-
tence and world. We have also seen, however, that they disagree on what
exactly ‘transcendence’ and ‘world’ mean and therefore also how to con-
ceive of the correlation between mind and world that is supposed to
provide the most basic form of sociality. For Husserl, transcendence refers
to the objectively or naturally real, for example, the perceptual object that
displays an inexhaustive number of unperceived aspects and is equally
available to a multiplicity of perceivers. Transcendence, as he uses the
term, necessarily imply open intersubjectivity in the form of structural
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
references to a plurality of potential other subjects who are capable of
perceiving the aspects of the object that I currently do not perceive.
Heidegger, on the other hand, conceives of transcendence as the sur-
passing of entities towards the world and, hence, as the relational whole
that makes intentionality possible. What is the irreducible social dimen-
sion of this type of transcendence? Heidegger’s line of argument is the
following: Transcendence opens a field of possibilities in which we
encounter entities. Such a field of possibilities implies selfhood, in the
existential sense, since the field of possibilities must always be significant to
someone (in a non-thematic and pre-reflective way). Furthermore, such a
field of possibilities relates to others in manifold ways. It relates to the
others that have taught me to use tools, it relates to the others with whom
I share social conventions, and it relates to the others that simply happen
to be present. Importantly, Heidegger argues that we are constitutively
responsive to the behaviour of others because our existential projections
always concern the world that we share with others in such a way that
others have a stake in how we comport ourselves to this world. By virtue of
our non-thematic relatedness to others, they affect our possibilities
of being.
To put this point in another way, other people are indeed among the
entities surpassed by Dasein in transcendence. We encounter them as
distinct innerworldly entities within fields of possibilities. Yet they are
not only surpassed but also an irreducible part of the movement of
transcendence itself. They are not only encountered or constituted within
the world; they also play a constituting role in the emergence of the world.
‘Fellow humans are certainly occurrent’, but more importantly ‘they join
in constituting the world [machen die Welt mit aus]’ (GA, /).
The transcendental condition of being-with is, as we have seen, by
necessity factically configured. The actual encounter with another ‘does
not first constitute the possibility that one Dasein has a world with
another’. Rather, ‘the different modes of factical being-with-one-another
constitute in each case only the factical possibilities . . . of the disclosure of
the world’ (GA, /). The factical encounter with another human
being does not transform a private world into a shared world. The world is
always already shared. The factical encounter reconfigures the shared world,
which is to say, that the factical encounter constitutes the factical possi-
bilities that make up a particular disclosure of the world. Social relations co-
constitute the possibilities opened up in transcendence.
The argument that being-with is indeed a transcendental condition
might worry some scholars in light of Heidegger’s later rejection of the
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
transcendental approach to the question of being. This is not the place for
an extended discussion of Heidegger’s relation to transcendental philoso-
phy but a few remarks are in place.
In GA, Heidegger discusses the fundamental ontological concept of
transcendence by saying that this was a preliminary step towards a thinking
of the truth of being that has to disappear (GA, /, /). This
is so because transcendence, despite Heidegger’s intention and explicit
warnings, ‘still presupposes an under and this-side [Unter und Diesseits] and
is in danger of still being misinterpreted after all as the action of an “I” and
subject’ (GA, /). The problem with the concept of transcendence
and therefore also the transcendental phenomenological approach as such
is that it too easily leads to the misinterpretation that being-in-the-world is
somehow the product of the activity of a subject.
In the discussion with Husserl, we saw that Heidegger introduces his
reinterpretation of the concept of transcendence to escape the idea that we
can conceive of manifestation as grounded in subjectivity. He questions
the correlation between mind and world and proposes that we rethink this
relation in such a way that we avoid giving priority to any of its relata.
Dasein is simultaneously ontic and ontological; the dative of manifestation
must be analysed in terms of its own being. From this perspective, it is
quite ironic that the later Heidegger takes the transcendental vocabulary to
lead to the very misinterpretation that it was supposed to correct, namely,
the assumption that being-in-the-world is a projection somehow made by
the human being rather than the unitary ground of human being and
world. It seems, then, that the issue with transcendental phenomenology is
not that it seeks to understand the necessary structure of our experiences
and the process of manifestation but rather, as Malpas puts it, that
there will nevertheless be a tendency, simply because of the way transcen-
dence is configured as a ‘relation’ between [Dasein] and world, to look to
ground that relation in one or another of the two poles of that relation, and
since transcendence is explicitly characterized as a ‘surpassing’ by [Dasein]
in the direction of world, it seems almost inevitable that it will lead to a
conception of the grounding to be accomplished here as one that looks to
find the ground of transcendence in [Dasein]. (Malpas , )
According to this interpretation, Heidegger rejects the transcendental
approach because it is too easy to read it as if the relation between human
and world is grounded in the human-relata, that is, that being-in-the-


See Crowell (, ), Dahlstrom (), Malpas (), Crowell & Malpas (ed.) (),
Engelland () and, most recently, Westerlund ().
 Transcendental Social Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger 
world entails a form of subjectivism (see also Engelland , ). If this
interpretation is correct, however, there is no reason to believe that the
transcendental project, as I understand it, is radically incompatible with
the later Heidegger. It seems to me that Heidegger merely rejects his earlier
terminology to avoid a certain misinterpretation of his thought. Important
as this may be, it fails to raise any substantial objections. As a result, the
switch from the activistic metaphors of ‘transcendence’ and ‘projection’ to
the passivistic metaphors of ‘event [Ereignis]’ and ‘releasement
[Gelassenheit]’ amounts to a shift of emphasis insofar as both terminologies
try to spell out the basic structure that enables entities to appear
as meaningful.
There are of course more substantial points of divergence between the
early and the late Heidegger – especially concerning the ontological role of
historicity. In Chapter , I argue that Heidegger in the ‘s and ‘s
develops a being-historical or metapolitical manner of thought that under-
lies his political engagement. I show, however, that this philosophical
underpinning is partly motivated by a rejection of the transcendental
framework outlined here and that certain elements of his politics, there-
fore, contradict his social ontology.
His self-criticism notwithstanding, it is fair to say that Heidegger’s
account of being-with is transcendental insofar as he believes that the
world is necessarily bound up with social life and that intentionality itself
comes with an irreducible social dimension. In line with traditional
transcendental philosophy, Heidegger arrives at these indispensability
claims by way of an a priori analysis of experience. In contrast to the
classical approaches, however, Heidegger’s transcendentalism does not
purport to secure knowledge, science, or objectivity nor does it locate
the conditions of possibility squarely in the subject. Heidegger contends
that phenomenology must shed light on the necessary structure of exis-
tential projections, and his analysis shows that existential projections are
made possible not by internal conceptual schemes or the acts of an
absolute ego but the holistic relations to things, others, and ourselves that
constitute the basic correlation between human and world.
  

Holism and Relativism

Dasein’s intentionality is made possible by the structure of being-in-the-world.

This makes intentional states subject to a high degree of context-sensitivity.
This context-sensitivity runs in two directions. First, Heidegger argues that we
must stand in a certain relation to environmental objects themselves to have
intentional states. Let’s call this type of context-sensitivity object externalism.
Second, Heidegger argues that we must also stand in a certain relation to other
people to have intentional states. Let’s call this type of context-sensitivity social
externalism.
Let me start by clarifying this terminology. By using the term ‘exter-
nalism’, I do not intend to suggest that Heidegger fits nicely within the
internalist/externalist debate of Putnam, Kripke, Burge, Searle, and so on.
This debate revolves around the question whether meaning is determined
by factors internal or external to the mind. As has been suggested (by, e.g.,
Crowell , Chapter ; O’Murchadha ; Zahavi ), phenome-
nologists like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty all reject the central
assumption in this debate, namely, that it is possible to make a clear
distinction between mind and world, inner and outer. Yet, one might
argue that phenomenology is nothing but a methodological commitment
to a version of internalism. It is, after all, a philosophical inquiry that
studies how phenomena are given to a subject. In Heidegger’s terminol-
ogy, ‘[b]eing is given only if the understanding of being, i.e. Dasein, exists’
(GA, /). But on the other hand, Heidegger simultaneously insists
that he does not simply study the ‘inner sphere’ of the subject:
When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not
somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally
encapsulated, but its primary kind of being is such that it is always
‘outside’ alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world
already discovered. . . . [B]ut even in this ‘being-outside’ alongside the
object, Dasein is still ‘inside,’ if we understand this in the correct sense.
(SZ, /)


 Holism and Relativism 
As this passage shows, the concept of being-in-the-world radically expands
both the realm of the ‘internal’ and the realm of the ‘external’ to such an
extent that they become indistinguishable. In this way, Heidegger’s con-
cept of being-in-the-world complicates the internalist/externalist distinc-
tion by showing that his methodological ‘internalism’ (i.e., his study of the
ontological make-up of the ‘mind’) is equally committed to the ‘externalist’
view that intentionality depends in crucial ways on elements ‘out’ in ‘the
world’. When Putnam famously states: ‘Cut the pie anyway you like,
“meanings” just ain’t in the head’ (Putnam , ), Heidegger would
reply the same thing as McDowell (), namely, ‘neither is the mind’.
In consequence, I use the terms object externalism and social externalism to
refer to relations of dependence between mind and world that can only be
studied from within the first-person perspective of phenomenology.
Heidegger is an object externalist and a social externalist insofar as he
holds that entities are meaningful by virtue of appearing within a whole
consisting of both relations between objects and relations between people.
For this reason, Heidegger’s position can also be characterised as a form of
holism. Roughly, this is the thesis that the meaning of the parts (entities)
depends on the whole (the world). A common objection to holism is that it
leads to a form of relativism. In traditional terms, holism states that an
attitude depends on an entire system of attitudes. If this is true, two people
can only have the same attitude if they share the exact same system of
attitudes. Yet, so the objection goes, this is very unlikely. We are, after all,
raised in different ways, engaged in different personal projects, and we,
therefore, cannot be assumed to possess the exact same information about
the world. The same objection can easily be translated into Heideggerian
terms: If our understanding depends on a relational whole, and if two
people, qua their facticity, necessarily find themselves embedded within
different relational wholes, then these two people are bound to understand
entities in different ways.
Using the term ‘understanding of being’ to refer to this relational
structure that guides or shapes our comportment towards entities (cf.
SZ, /, /; GA, /; GA, /f ), it seems that different
people have different understandings of being. But if this is the case, it
seems that interpretative differences cannot be reconciled, since it would
be impossible to do so by reference to the common ground of a realm of
brute facts, and since it would be impossible to translate two divergent
interpretations into each other, assuming that such translation could only
be done piecemeal in which case my interpretation of some entity would
necessarily be informed by my understanding of being, while your
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
interpretation of the same entity would necessarily be informed by your
understanding of being. It seems, then, that Heidegger’s holism entails a
form of relativism.
This chapter aims to clarify the nature of Heidegger’s holism and its two
directions of context-sensitivity. I argue that Heidegger’s externalist con-
ception of intentionality puts us into relation with others – including those
with whom we do not share an understanding of being – in a way that does
not lead to a vicious relativism.
In Section ., I outline two prominent interpretations of Heidegger’s
holism. The first interpretation is found in Lafont’s work on what she calls
Heidegger’s linguistic idealism. According to this interpretation,
Heidegger is a social externalist since he believes that meaning depends
on one’s linguistic community and an object internalist since he takes
linguistic meaning to fully determine what a subject can intend and refer
to. The other interpretation, the pragmatic conventionalist interpretation
(PCI), argues, first, that Heidegger is an object externalist since he takes
pragmatic engagement with tools to be the paradigmatic form of inten-
tionality and, second, that he is a social externalist since proper tool use is
determined by collective social practices. Despite their differences, I argue
that both interpretations give rise to charges of relativism like the one just
outlined because they both take Heidegger to be committed to the claim
that meaning depends on some kind of social convention. Section . calls
this assumption into question and proposes an alternative reading of
Heidegger’s holism. Drawing on his account of object-awareness – that is,
his account of what it is to thematically intend inert entities – I argue that
the pragmatic interpretation is right in holding that Heidegger is an object
externalist and a social externalist since he believes that our engagements
with objects like tools constitutively depend on backgrounded relations to
other people or what I’ll call non-thematic other-awareness. Against the two
lines of interpretation, however, I argue that Heidegger does not restrict
such non-thematic other-awareness to those with whom we share conven-
tions. In Section ., I thus go on to argue that Heidegger’s social
externalism is much more dynamic than usually believed and that he holds
that we share the world with whomever is there because we, to borrow a
phrase from Davidson, constantly triangulate our understanding of objects
with the behaviour of others. Finally, in Section ., I show that this
reading of Heidegger’s holism enables us to dispel the relativistic worries
often associated with holism and that his account of object and social
externalism allows us to intend the same entity even with people that do
not share our understanding of being.
 Holism and Relativism 

. Two Interpretations of Heidegger’s Holism

Heidegger argues that our intentional relations towards objects and our
intentional relations towards other people are made possible by a holistic
background of relations that include relations to environmental objects, to
other people, and to ourselves. As argued in Chapter , this means that
being-with is a dimension of appearance rather than a distinct domain. It
follows that some kind of sociality characterises how we comport ourselves
to non-Dasein-like objects like tools. It also means that object externalism
and social externalism somehow come together; for Heidegger, at least,
they seem to be two sides of the same coin. A complete analysis of object-
awareness must therefore include an analysis of non-thematic other-aware-
ness. More specifically, it must show how non-thematic other-awareness
affects or constrains how we comport ourselves towards objects. While
lurking in the background, social relations co-determine which entities we
can intend, how we can intend them, and with whom we can intend them.
This issue is at the heart of discussions of Heidegger’s holism and
alleged relativism. Let’s grant that our understanding of being is informed
by the communities to which we belong. How, if at all, can people who do
not share an understanding of being – say, people from different cultures –
intend and refer to the same objects? Alternatively, do they simply live in
different worlds? What would follow from this idea, both ontologically,
ethically, and politically?
Before turning to my own interpretation of Heidegger’s holism,
I examine, first, the linguistic holism that Lafont attributes to Heidegger
and, second, the interpretation advocated by pragmatic conventionalists
like Dreyfus, Okrent, and Carman.

.. Linguistic Holism

Taking her cue from the late Heidegger’s claim that language is the house
of being, the main point in Lafont’s work () is that his particular
version of ontological holism leads to a vicious relativism. In her reading,
Heidegger is committed to the following claims: () The manner in which
we experience entities is determined by our prior understanding of being.
() Our understanding of being is factical, historical, and, in the end,
linguistic. It follows from these claims, according to Lafont, that there is a
plurality of understandings of being and that these since they a priorily
determine our experience of entities, are incommensurable in the sense
that they lack an external ground against which they can be revised and
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
reconciled. Indeed, they seem to render meaningful communication
between understandings of being impossible.
Classical transcendental philosophers, like Kant and Husserl, are equally
committed to some version of () the a priori claim. This claim alone does
not entail relativism since Kant and Husserl assume that all rational
creatures share the same understanding of being (e.g., Kant’s categories).
What is remarkable about Heidegger is, according to Lafont, that he
adopts () the a priori claim of the transcendental tradition while also
claiming () that our understanding of being is factical. He thereby
‘detranscendentalizes’ the conditions of possibility of intelligibility
(Lafont , ). This leads to a fragmentation of the correlation
between mind and world, a fragmentation of ‘the thing for us’ into
multiple incommensurable pieces (Lafont a, ). In other words,
each understanding of being comes with its own body of entities. In effect,
there is no common ground between world disclosures. Heidegger’s
holism thereby becomes an ontological relativism.
Summarising this point, she says that Heidegger is committed to the
idea that ‘meaning determines reference’, which is to say that ‘the way in
which entities are understood determines what these entities are (for us)’
and ‘determines which entities we can refer to’ (Lafont a, ). This
bears on the point concerning externalism in the following way: The
notion of an understanding of being does indeed express what I have
called social externalism since an understanding of being depends on
Dasein’s belonging to a linguistic community. In claiming that ‘meaning
determines reference’, however, Lafont takes issue with the claim that
Heidegger should also be an object externalist. If meaning is factical
and linguistic, and if meaning determines which objects we can success-
fully refer to, two people who do not share a theory of meaning or an
understanding of being (by not speaking the same language) cannot
successfully refer to the same entity. This makes Heidegger a social


Lafont speaks of semantic externalism and social externalism rather than object externalism and social
externalism (Lafont ). I largely agree with her characterisation of the two positions. In her
words, the former is the ‘thesis that concepts are not individuated by the understanding of the
speakers who use them, but are partly individuated by their referents’, whereas the latter is the ‘thesis
that concepts are not individuated by the understanding of the individual speakers who use them,
but are partly individuated by other speakers’ (Lafont , ). Nonetheless, I find her use of the
term ‘semantic externalism’ misleading for two reasons. As we will see briefly, it is questionable that
Heidegger’s primary concern is to develop a semantic theory in the traditional sense of a theory that
assigns semantic contents to linguistic expressions. Second, the term semantic externalism usually
just means that the meanings of words depend on our relations to either the physical or social
environment and, hence, covers both object externalism and social externalism.
 Holism and Relativism 
externalist, that is, a proponent of the idea that intentional content is
individuated by the (linguistic) community rather than the individual, and
an object internalist, who holds that the meaning of intentional states is a
function of elements internally accessible to the (linguistically extended)
subject rather than external factors. To share a world is, accordingly, to
belong to the same linguistic community. ‘[T]he world in which Dasein
lives must be an expressible system of relations in order to be sharable with
others as the same world’ (Lafont b, ).

.. Pragmatic Holism

Drawing on SZ’s analysis of tools, pragmatists argue against Lafont by
pointing out that Heidegger – or at least the early Heidegger – does not
take our primordial relation to the world to be linguistically or conceptu-
ally mediated (Carman , ; Dreyfus , ; Okrent ,
; Wrathall ). He understands object-awareness primarily based
on our pre-linguistic and pre-reflective engagement with our physical
environment. As Carman says, linguistic meaning is ‘parasitic on . . .
pragmatic signification’ (, ).
The pragmatic account of meaning still leads to ontological holism since
the use of a tool presupposes a relational whole of significance. We have
also seen, however, that pragmatic conventionalists like Dreyfus, Okrent,
and Carman take the analysis of the Anyone to be Heidegger’s best
account of how this relational whole involves social relations. In sum, they
argue that all tool use depends on socially constituted norms, that is, that it
presupposes a basic understanding of proper or typical tool use that is
established by relatively stable social practices. This combines social exter-
nalism with a pragmatic version of object externalism, according to which
meaning does not depend on subjective states or attitudes but is funda-
mentally embedded within external practices (cf. Carman , ).
The argument hinges on the idea that we cannot adequately explain tool
use like hammering by reference to individual activity alone. Strictly
speaking, tool use requires an element of normativity, that is, that there
are norms for right and wrong ways to use a tool. Such norms arguably
presuppose a community of tool users. The activity of hammering
requires, as Okrent puts it, ‘holistically integrated functional systems of
types’ that ‘are articulated independently of and prior to the activity of any
given agent’ (Okrent , ). Ultimately, tool use is derived from the
familiarity handed over to us by the Anyone. So, whereas Lafont argues
that Heidegger takes meaning to be a function of linguistic communities,
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
PCI argues that Heidegger takes meaning to depend on ‘collective social
practices in all their ontic contingency’ (Carman , ) and that
‘[s]ocial practice provides hermeneutic, not just causal, conditions of
interpretation’ (Carman , ).
According to PCI, Heidegger is hence committed to both object exter-
nalism, since we are in immediate contact with external objects that we
use, and social externalism, since the pragmatic meaning of these objects is
determined by the standards implicit in our social practices. In essence, we
share the world with those who are socialised into the same social practices
as us.
The pragmatic interpretation certainly dodges the charge of linguistic
idealism, but, as Lafont has remarked, it is unclear in which way the
question whether meaning is linguistic or not ‘have any impact whatsoever
on the question whether (and in which way) our experience is essentially
prejudiced by a prior understanding, linguistic or otherwise’ (Lafont
b, ). Is the insistence on pragmatic object externalism enough to
avoid the charge of relativism?
At this point, we must make explicit two criteria that are required for a
successful (phenomenological and holistic) reply to the charge of relativ-
ism. First, it must be possible for two people to intend the same entity.
This I will call the jointness condition. Second, in accord with the basic
tenets of holism, different people have different understandings of being.
This I will call the differentiation condition. In these terms, Lafont argues
that Heidegger is a relativist since his holism does not satisfy the jointness
condition, that is, because he fails to show that two people with different
understandings of being can intend or refer to the same entity. The
question is to which extent – and under which circumstances – PCI
satisfies these two conditions.
Dreyfus claims that ‘[s]ociety is the ontological source of familiarity and
readiness that makes the ontical discovering of entities, of others, and even
of myself possible’ (Dreyfus , ). This idea is problematic for once
we grant that there are multiple distinct ‘societies’, it must also be granted
that there are multiple and distinct ‘ontological sources’ of intelligibility
and that these, in turn, must make different bodies of entities ontically
discoverable. In an article written with Charles Spinosa, Dreyfus, for
instance, denies the metaphysical realist claim that ‘all true descriptions
of the universe are compatible’, opting instead for a ‘multiple realism’
according to which ‘the universe can function in a finite number of
different ways, each having its own components or kinds’ (Dreyfus &
Spinosa , f ). Yet, if there are indeed a multiplicity of incompatible
 Holism and Relativism 
worlds, as Dreyfus and Spinosa argue, and each has ‘its own components
or kinds’, how are we to satisfy the jointness condition? How are people in
different worlds capable of intending or referring to the same entities? It
thus seems that the social externalism extracted from the analysis of the
Anyone substitutes a relativism predicated on linguistic communities for a
relativism predicated on non-linguistic, practical communities.
The appeal to pragmatic object externalism makes no difference in this
regard. The claim that meaning depends on external practices still leads to
relativism if these external practices are demarcated along the lines of
shared conventions. Okrent illustrates this problem with an example taken
from the South African movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. A Coca Cola
bottle is thrown from a plane where it is discovered by Bushmen. The
Bushmen understand the bottle as a foreign tool but lacking an under-
standing of mass-produced soft drinks, they cannot understand it as a
Coke bottle. In the movie, one of the Bushmen, Xi, goes on a quest to
dispose of the bottle, which he assumes is a cursed gift from the gods.
During this journey, Xi encounters a biologist, who is, of course, familiar
with the social practices to which Coke bottles belong. Now, if we were to
follow PCI, this encounter would be quite disappointing. Assuming with
Dreyfus that society is the ultimate source of intelligibility, Xi and the
biologist would be unable to successfully refer to the same entity since Xi
can only conceive of the bottle as a gift from the gods while the biologist
can only conceive of the bottle as a Coke bottle. It seems that PCI can only
satisfy the jointness condition in intracommunal cases.
We can put this point more precisely by considering the PCI account of
the a as b-formula. Committed to a form of anti-physicalism or -reduc-
tionism, pragmatic object externalism does not mean that we have an
uninterpreted access to entities, to the a-variable. Rather, in our ongoing
coping, we always engage entities as objects of use. We have, in other
words, a non-linguistic access to the b-variable. Furthermore, the b-vari-
able is determined a priorily by the Anyone, that is, by the understanding
of being afforded to us by the social practices essential to our cultures,
communities, or societies. In contrast, imagine a naturalistically inclined


Dreyfus and Spinosa do, in fact, suggest that ‘it makes sense to talk of some internally consistent
unity like a kind that is outside any world’ (Dreyfus & Spinosa , ), but as Wrathall has argued
‘to insist that the universe itself works in incompatible ways would threaten that unity, since if we
find that something can be truly described as both p and not-p, we must either deny the principle of
non-contradiction or conclude that there is more than one object involved’ (Wrathall , ).
This means that Dreyfus and Spinosa, threatened by inconsistency, are forced to give up their claim
to an ontic unity outside any world and thereby embrace a form of pragmatic relativism.
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
object externalism, for example, natural kind externalism, according to
which at least some of our references are determined by the object’s
physical microstructure or by the object’s causal history. Presumably,
natural kind externalism would enable intercommunal references, but this
option is not available to Heidegger or his pragmatist interpreters.
It seems, then, that Heidegger’s holism leads to an ontological relativism
where the understandings of being handed over to us by our culture or
society fully determine how we discover entities. This social externalism
determines whom we share the world with to the extent that those raised
according to different pragmatic or linguistic conventions can be said to
live in worlds entirely different from our own.

. Object-Awareness and Relativism

To clarify Heidegger’s position on object and social externalism, I’ll turn to
two of his lecture courses – one from  and one from . Both of

Carman’s defence of PCI involves what he calls an ‘ontic realism’, namely, ‘the claim that occurrent
entities exist and have a determinate spatiotemporal structure independently of us and our
understanding of them’ (Carman , ). Maintaining that world (in the two existential
senses) is Dasein-dependent, Carman argues that Heidegger is indeed a realist about occurrent
entities or natural kinds and that we can have knowledge of entities as they are in themselves
(Carman , ). He argues that Heidegger maintains that all knowledge is grounded in a
definite mode of being-in-the-world thereby denying, in contrast to a naturalist like Searle, that there
is an uninterpreted access to the a-variable. Nonetheless, certain experiences, like the mood of
anxiety, provide a ‘preconceptual, precognitive access to the real as such’ (Carman , ), to
entities as they are independently of Dasein.
At the face of it, Carman’s ontic realism seems to make intercommunal references possible since
the mood of anxiety allegedly makes occurrent entities available to anyone independently of their
social practices. However, Carman still maintains that ‘rigid designation’ is a ‘function of our
willingness to defer to informed opinion about the identities of individuals and natural kinds. It is
thus the social structure of authority . . ., not the physical structure of reality, that determines the
reference of names and kind terms’ (Carman , n). Despite his own ontic realism, Carman
thus seems to limit the jointness condition to intracommunal cases, to cases where we have the same
‘social structure of authority’. For this reason, his interpretation remains in line with pragmatic
conventionalism of someone like Dreyfus.
This point aside, I have sympathy for the idea that certain experiences reveal that the b-variable
does not exhaust the a-variable. In fact, I take it to be central to Heidegger’s holism. Nonetheless,
Carman’s ontic realism relies on a somewhat ambiguous concept of ‘nature’. At times, he argues that
the nature revealed to Dasein in anxiety is equivalent to a scientific conception of ‘brute physical
nature’ as opposed to socially constituted artefacts (Carman , , cf. ). At other times, he
opts for the more modest claim that ‘nature as such is minimally accessible to us precisely as
extending beyond the hermeneutic conditions peculiar to us and our familiar worlds’ (Carman ,
). In my opinion, Heidegger only endorses the latter option. The former presupposes that anxiety
discloses a world consisting of the ‘brute’ facts of, say, physics, chemistry, and biology, but not only
is this phenomenologically implausible, these facts are, as Carman acknowledges elsewhere (,
n), only intelligible on the basis of some of the social practices that anxiety allegedly puts out
of force.
 Holism and Relativism 
these lecture courses investigate how social relations determine object-
awareness in a way that bears directly on the issue of relativism.
In the  lecture course, Heidegger discusses his perception of the
lectern in front of him. He says that the experience of the lectern as a
lectern depends on a holistic background structure that includes the
blackboard, the books, the students, and so on. He argues that he, as the
lecturer, does not discover the lectern as an ‘isolated I-self’ (GA/, /
). Instead, he shares a background familiarity with all of the students,
who also see the lectern as a lectern, although they see it from a different
perspective not only physically but also practically, since they do not see
the lectern as something they should use. Even a farmer, who is largely
unfamiliar with academia, will see the lectern as the ‘place for the teacher’
(GA/, /). So far, this analysis is perfectly in line with PCI.
Heidegger stresses that his intended object is an environmental thing or
tool (rather, than, say, a mental representation, a collection of sense data,
or a physical object with a certain molecular composition) and he clearly
thinks of this background familiarity in terms of a social practice.
Lecturer, students, and farmer have an environmental object as a
common reference point, thus satisfying the jointness condition. They
also share an understanding of being handed over to them by ‘society’ or
the Anyone even if there are slight variations in this background familiar-
ity, as per the differentiation condition. Yet, if Heidegger is to dodge the
charge of relativism, as defined above, he must also show that his account
of object externalism and social externalism can also explain the possibility
of intending the object with people who belong to a different ‘society’.
Heidegger flags this issue by conceiving an, admittedly bigoted, thought
experiment that is structurally similar to the problem illustrated with The
Gods Must Be Crazy above. He asks his students to
imagine a Negro from Senegal suddenly transplanted here from his hut.
What he would see, gazing at this object, is difficult to say precisely: perhaps
something to do with magic, or something behind which one could find
good protection against arrows and flying stones. Or would he not know
what to make of it at all, just seeing complexes of colours and surfaces,
simply a thing, a something which simply is? So, my seeing and that of a
Senegal Negro are fundamentally different. All they have in common is that
in both cases something is seen. (GA/, f/)
For the sake of the argument, I will assume that the Senegalese is indeed
unfamiliar with lecture halls of any kind. Despite this unfamiliarity, the
Senegalese would still, according to Heidegger, not see a brute fact.
Instead, he would experience an ‘instrumental strangeness’
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
(GA/, /), a tool that he had yet to understand. In this respect, the
experience of the Senegalese would be similar to Heidegger’s. So, when
Heidegger says that his seeing and that of the Senegalese are ‘fundamen-
tally different’, he only means to say that they see the same environmental
thing, although they see it in different ways depending on the different
holistic networks that constitute their respective interpretative
backgrounds.
The pragmatic conventionalist interpretation would take this as evi-
dence that the Anyone does indeed have the final say in making things
meaningful. The Germans are raised in one society and share one under-
standing of being, and the Senegalese is raised in a different society and has
a different understanding of being. Yet, it is clear from his description that
Heidegger believes that he and the Senegalese do see the same entity. The
point is that they see things differently, not that they see different things.
Elsewhere he writes that ‘[e]ven a savage transplanted among us exercises
his understanding in this world, even though it can be utterly strange to
him in its detail’ (GA, /, my italics). This underscores that
Heidegger believes that it is possible for two people who do not share
conventions and social practices to refer to and to intend the same entity,
that they can share the same world.
Indeed, Heidegger suggests that even if his experiences can be said to
differ from that of the Senegalese, he would ‘still assert that universally
valid propositions are possible’ and that their respective experiences of the
‘meaningful character’ of the lectern are ‘in their essence absolutely iden-
tical’ (GA/, /). At this point, however, Heidegger offers no
argument for these claims.
Fortunately, Heidegger provides an extended discussion of what it is to
jointly intend an object in the lecture course called Introduction to
Philosophy from /. Once again, he takes up an example from the
lecture hall. He asks, What enables several people to intend the same piece
of chalk?
He starts by outlining the intentional structure of joint attention:
there is a mutual not-grasping-each-other and yet a peculiar with-the-other.
The ‘with’ indicates commonality. The commonality is that one is as taken
as the other, that the same thing is valid for both. One comports oneself in
the same way as the other. (GA, )
In joint attention, there is a mutual non-thematic awareness between the
co-intenders, who are thematically oriented towards an object that is,
accordingly, experienced as a shared object of attention. We should also
 Holism and Relativism 
note that Heidegger in the last cited sentence says that the co-intenders
must comport themselves towards the object in the same way. At the face
of it, this formulation seems to contradict the differentiation condition by
suggesting that the co-intenders must have identical attitudes. This would
be impossible given Heidegger’s holist commitments. For the time being,
let us simply flag this issue. We shall return to it, once a few more details
have been settled.
Drawing on his overall understanding of intentionality as practical
comportment, he quickly dispels the idea that the jointness consists in
the co-intenders experiencing identical sets of sense data as well as the idea
that the jointness consists in the co-intenders simply experiencing different
perceptual aspects of the same object located in a single position in space
and time. Both of these approaches model perceptual experience and
attention on a theoretical attitude. In contrast, Heidegger argues that all
seeing is a practically engaged seeing as. Hence, joint attention must be joint
comportment towards an entity within a practical field of possibilities.
Given that the a as b-formula is supposed to account for the intentional
structure of the ‘full and concrete’ human being, our seeing as is partly
determined by social roles and personal circumstances. This means that the
students will comport themselves to the piece of chalk in a different way
than Heidegger, as the lecturer, will. This leads Heidegger to argue that a
strict similarity in our practical comportments is simply too demanding a
criterion for determining what constitutes their jointness. As Heidegger
puts it, ‘comporting oneself towards the same does not exclude but rather
includes that the comportment is different’ (GA, ). He thereby
embraces a version of the differentiation condition.
Heidegger then remarks that in traditional metaphysics the category of
identity ensures that the same object can be intended by several subjects
without it being fragmented into multiple mind-dependent ideas with no
connection between them. Subjecting this idea to a phenomenological
reinterpretation, he proposes that it belongs to the nature of entities – or,
rather, the nature of our object-awareness – that they can be objects of
joint comportment:
We can now say that sameness [Selbigkeit] can very well be a determination
of the object itself, but this entity, which is identical with itself, also stands
in the relation of becoming experienced. This relation makes the present
entity relative to several entities with the character of Dasein. So, we have
found this: An entity that is identical with itself and then, as this identical, a
possible object of experience for several. (GA, )
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
This is a transcendental social ontological argument that locates a funda-
mental form of sociality in the very structure of how we intend or disclose
entities. As such, Heidegger’s argument runs parallel to Husserl’s account
of open intersubjectivity, albeit there are a few important differences.
Recall the social ontological consequence drawn by Husserl from the
analysis of horizontal intentionality (see Section .): In perceiving an
entity, a subject is non-thematically aware that the entity can serve as a
pole for several other subjects who will then perceive different aspects of
the entity. Heidegger takes practical comportment rather than theoretical
perception to be the paradigm of object-awareness. This means that his
argument reaches a slightly different even if structurally similar conclusion.
In comporting oneself towards an entity, a subject is non-thematically
aware that the entity can serve as a reference point for several other subjects
who comport themselves towards the entity in different ways qua disclos-
ing it by way of different existential projections. Allow me to unfold this a
bit. When intending a as b, an intender is non-thematically aware that that
same a can serve as the intentional object for several co-intenders and,
hence, lead to several interpretations of b. It is crucial to note that this
interpretation of object-awareness at no point presupposes that we have
immediate access to the a-variable, to the entity as a brute fact. When
disclosing a as b, the subject is non-thematically aware that b does not
exhaust a, and that a could also be disclosed as b, b, . . ., bn by other
people or by itself at some other time.
Heidegger formulates this point by stressing that we share the piece of
chalk without breaking it into pieces [zerteilen in Stücke]. That is to say, we
must not end up with an object internalism where the different intenders
have their own private experience of the piece of chalk. Thus, in line with
contemporary collective intentionality analysis, to which I will return in
Chapter , Heidegger argues that joint comportment cannot simply be a
distributive pattern of individual comportment. Instead, the involved
experiences must somehow interconnect. Elaborating on his pragmatic
account of intentionality as practical comportment, he suggests that ‘[t]o
share in something [Sich in etwas teilen], without dividing it into pieces,
means: to leave something to use [Gebrauch] and to leave it for mutual use’
(GA, ). Object-awareness is always the awareness of the specific use
of an entity, but, pace PCI, this presupposes that we are already aware that
the same entity can be used differently by others. That we leave or entrust
the chalk to mutual use means that the piece of chalk constitutes a
common reference point in multiple systems of use, that it is a common
reference point in several fields of possibilities.
 Holism and Relativism 
I might, of course, be wrong to assume that the other intends the same
entity like me. Perhaps the student does not intend the chalk at all but is
simply daydreaming. Heidegger’s point, however, concerns the possibility
of intending the same entity rather than its actualisation. It is, simply put,
a transcendental condition on how we experience things that when we
intend an object, we necessarily and tacitly assume that this object is
available to a plurality of other agents.
This view of object-awareness aligns with the idea of transcendence as
the surpassing of entities towards their being. The same entity can be
transcended in multiple ways; it can appear in several distinct fields of
possibilities. In his elaboration of the concept of transcendence, he com-
ments on this aspect of how we disclose entities by saying that ‘[e]ntities
have different stages of discoverability, diverse possibilities in which they
manifest themselves in themselves’ (GA, /), and that ‘[w]henever
and however they are encountered, real entities always reveal themselves –
precisely when they are disclosed as they are in themselves – only as a
restriction, as one possible realisation of the possible’ (GA, /).
When an entity is encountered, we always encounter it as affording certain
possibilities, although we are aware that it could also afford different
possibilities if we or others approached or cared for it differently.
This discussion of joint attention bears on the problem of relativism
insofar as it attempts to reconcile object externalism and social externalism.
Indeed, Heidegger is explicit that even though he proceeds from the
phenomenon of joint attention he reaches a conclusion about object-
awareness as such. In his words, his analysis reveals the fundamental
structure of ‘unconcealment’ or ‘truth’.
We ask about a participation [Teilhabe] in entities, in which we share and
divide ourselves in something [wir uns in etwas teilen] that belongs to
entities, without losing some feature of the entities and without changing
them. How do we share and divide ourselves in this strange participation in
entities? We share and divide ourselves in their unconcealment, their truth.
Only if we share and divide ourselves in the unconcealment of entities, can
we let it, the entity, be as it manifests itself. And if we share and divide


Heidegger never offers an account of when we are epistemically justified in believing that we intend
an entity with someone. He is in general quite dismissive of epistemological issues due to his focus
on the b-side of the a as b-formula. As Golob rightly notes, ‘Heidegger has focused intensely on the
question of how we can intend any entity; indeed, his whole theory is intended as an account of the
transcendental conditions on such. But he has said little about the question of how we intend this
entity as opposed to that’ (Golob , ).
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
ourselves in unconcealment, we have something in common that is not a
piece of the chalk and likewise not something that can be the possession of
an individual. (GA, )
This dense passage continuously uses the formulation ‘wir teilen uns in’.
This requires a bit of unfolding. The German phrase ‘wir teilen uns’ means
that we share something equally. For instance, ‘wir teilen uns die
Aufgaben’ means that we share the tasks. Relatedly, ‘wir teilen in etwas’
means that we share in something, as when you share in the success of
something. The expression ‘wir teilen uns auf’, on the other hand, means
that we are (or should be) splitting up. As already pointed out, the word
teilen means both to share and to divide, and Heidegger constantly alludes
to this ambiguity. The problem is that ‘wir teilen uns in’ is not a common
German idiom, but a phrase coined by Heidegger. It means, literally, that
we ourselves are divided in some element. As I read it, Heidegger uses the
phrase to combine the jointness condition, that is, that we are related or
united in sharing something equally, and the differentiation condition,
according to which we each intend the entity in our own way and have
thus somehow split up. My (inelegant) solution is to translate the phrase
‘wir teilen uns in. . .’ to ‘we share and divide ourselves in. . .’
The central claim of the passage is, then, that we share and divide
ourselves in the unconcealment or truth of entities. Whenever Dasein
intends an entity, it does so by disclosing it within a field of possibilities
shaped by its upbringing in certain social practices and its own personal
preferences, but in intending the entity Dasein is also non-thematically
aware that the entity is also (potentially) given to others in such a way that
the entity – as a pole of our joint object-awareness – can be disclosed
differently. The entity relates and separates us at the same time.
This leaves ample room for both the jointness condition and the
differentiation condition. Two Dasein can intend the same object in
roughly similar ways if they share an understanding of being by being
raised in the same social practices. In this case, they would share the
experience of, say, a single lectern even though they would comport
themselves to it in slightly different ways due to their different spatial
and social positions. But two Dasein can also intend the same object even
if they do not share an understanding of being. In this case, they would
still share the experience of a single entity even though one could conceive
of it as a lectern while the other conceives of it as a shield against arrows.
Despite their differences, they still intend the same object. The reason for
this is not that one Dasein (say, the German Professor) suddenly has access
to the ‘mind’ of the other Dasein (the Senegalese) and can compare their
 Holism and Relativism 
respective ‘mental states’ from a point of nowhere. Rather, the jointness is
satisfied by the transcendental condition according to which it is a neces-
sary constraint on each of their respective interpretations that they take the
object to be a potential object of use for the other as well. For each the
saliences of the object are correlated with the other’s behaviour and
vice versa.
In the next section, I will unfold in more detail exactly which type of
relation holds between two Dasein that intends the same object while not
sharing an understanding of being. Before doing so, let us recap how this
discussion of what it is to share unconcealment relates to the issue
of externalism.
First, Heidegger does not take object-awareness to be settled solely by
factors available to the individual subject. Rather, when we intend an
object, we are put into relation with an environmental thing, which we
always understand in terms of its potential use. Intentionality depends in
this sense on our physical environment even if Heidegger rejects that
references are, in the end, settled by physicalist descriptions. This makes
Heidegger an object externalist in the pragmatic sense.
Second, whenever we intend entities, we are aware that they are
entrusted to mutual use. By mutual use, Heidegger means that the same
entity can figure in different types of comportment, that is, that the same a
can be intended as several b’s. It follows that understandings of being do
not exhaust our relations or references to entities even if we cannot intend
an entity without an understanding of being. It is intrinsic to unconceal-
ment that an entity can figure in several distinct understandings of being.
In Heidegger’s words, ‘we do not disjoint [zerteilen] and distribute [vertei-
len] the entity, rather we leave it undivided [ungeteilt]’ (GA, ). This
contradicts Lafont’s claim that Heidegger takes meaning to determine
reference and the idea that an understanding of being comes with its
own body of entities.
Third, Heidegger’s discussion of object-awareness shows that he does
indeed believe that intentionality is fundamentally social. But in contrast
to the strong social externalism of Lafont and PCI, Heidegger endorses a
weak or open-ended social externalism according to which meaning depends
on ongoing social interaction rather than stable social conventions or
practices. In object-awareness, we are non-thematically aware that the


This is why I agree with Carman that Heidegger is committed to the idea that nature is ‘minimally
accessible to us’ as extending beyond our respective interpretations of it (Carman , ). See
also note  above.
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
same a can led to b. . .n even if our tacit conventions dispose us to see a as b.
Unconcealment makes entities available to a plurality of different usages.

. Holism, Triangulation, and the Role of Language

We need to further clarify the relation between object-awareness and non-
thematic other-awareness. What is the relation between two intenders,
who do not intend each other but a common object? More specifically, in
which way is intentionality socially responsive if conventions do not a
priorily determine which entities we can intend, how we can intend them,
and with whom we can intend them? Heidegger replies by contrasting the
co-presence of two Dasein with two stones lying next to each other:
A stone is present next to a stone, likewise with Dasein next to Dasein, a
‘being at . . .’ next to a ‘being at . . .’. Not at all, rather, if a Dasein steps
alongside another Dasein, then the one steps into the realm of manifesta-
tion [Raum der Offenbarkeit] of the other, or, more precisely, its ‘being
at . . .’ moves in the same surrounding of manifestation [Umkreis von
Offenbarkeit]. (GA, )


Schmid has a very different reading of these passages in GA. On his view, Heidegger effectively
‘rejects the idea that inter-intentional givenness of this thing lies in its use within some joint activity’
(Schmid , ). When Heidegger says that the commonality of an intentional object is prior to
our usage – that it is founded in a ‘lettings things be’ (GA, ) – Schmid takes him to claim that
sociality is ultimately only to be found in our awareness of things as occurrent, which, he argues, is a
derivative form of intentionality compared to our disclosure as things as available. This leads him to
the conclusion that ‘Heidegger seems to keep the innermost of intentionality clear of sociality’
(Schmid , ). I do not think that the textual evidence supports this conclusion. In fact,
Schmid seems to turn Heidegger’s argument on its head. Not only does Heidegger endorse the idea
that a ‘mutual use’ [gemeinsame Gebrauch] is possible and, hence, that practical comportment can be
joint, he even shows that the most basic form of object-awareness – a form prior to the distinction
between practical and theoretical comportments – is constitutively open to others. Consider, for
instance, the following paragraph, which Schmid wrongly takes to support his conclusion:
‘This dividing in something first appeared to us in the form of a mutual entrusting of something
in use. But it turned out that already without making use of something, we jointly have entities,
present things, available things [Seiendes, Vorhandenes, Vorliegendes] lying in front of us in a certain way,
so that this sharing in something in being-with-each-other by something present [Vorhandenen]
cannot lie in the fulfillment of usage itself, but rather in a way of being of Dasein that already lies
before all usage and which makes the mutual usage of something possible in the first place’. (GA,
, my italics)
On Schmid’s reading, the central part of the passage is the claim that joint comportment only
discloses entities as Vorhandenes. He takes this as evidence that jointness is only possible in the
derivative form of intentionality that discloses entities as occurrent rather than available. The
problem is, however, that Heidegger a few pages later notes that he does not use the term
Vorhandenes in the technical sense known from SZ. He only uses it in the broad sense of ‘things
in contrast to Dasein’ (GA, ). For this reason, the passage claims that a form of jointness or
shared availability is prior to any idiosyncratic usage of an object. Heidegger does not, pace Schmid,
keep the innermost of intentionality clear of sociality.
 Holism and Relativism 
A little later, he elaborates:
Yet, if Dasein and Dasein never exist next to each other, then this means:
Each has, as essentially stepping-outside, already stepped into the manifes-
tation of the other. They necessarily carry themselves in the same sphere of
manifestation, even if they do not concern themselves with each as Da-sein
[sic]. To imply this, as Dasein, means: They communicate [mitteilen] with
entities of their own kind. In the nature of Da-sein lies being-with, even if
no other entity in fact exists. Dasein already brings with it the sphere of
possible neighbourship; it is from the outset already neighbour to . . .;
whereas two stones, for example, cannot be neighbouring. In being-with,
however, already lies the giving-free and giving-away of the Da – as
manifest broken-open-ness [offenbarer Aufgebrochenheit], in which entities
can appear, in turn, in accordance with their kind. (GA, )
The point put forward in these passages is that two Dasein, whether they
share conventions or not, share a world whenever they are phenomeno-
logically present to each other. This follows a priorily from the holistic
nature of human understanding: Whoever is ‘there’ is incorporated into
the relational whole that forms the interpretative background of our
understanding. Others have a say, however small, in how we understand
the world. In contrast to the stones, two Dasein cannot be completely
indifferent to each other. Even if they are not thematically concerned or
aware of each other but look at something else – Heidegger uses the term
‘being at . . .’ to refer to this intentional rather than spatial relation – they
have already stepped into each other’s realm of manifestation. They already
affect how the other intends the object.
The second passage describes this non-thematic other-awareness as a
form of communication. This requires a bit of unpacking because we tend
to think of communication as the exchange of fully formed linguistic
utterances. Yet, the communication described here is not linguistic in this
narrow sense. It is, after all, something that the two Dasein necessarily
partake in whenever they exist next to each other. Instead, Heidegger’s
point is that whenever another Dasein shows up in my realm of manifes-
tation, his behaviour (linguistic or otherwise) will affect how I comport
myself towards the surrounding entities. By the mere presence of the other,
I come to share the world with him – even if only in the minimal sense
that I come to see things as potential objects of use for him and not just for
me.
Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point when he writes:
The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through
the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of the others, of my
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
gestures and intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. . . . The
gesture which I witness outlines an intentional object. This object is
genuinely present and fully comprehended when the powers of my body
adjust themselves to it and overlap it. The gesture presents itself to me as a
question, bringing certain perceptible bits of the world to my notice, and
inviting my concurrence in them. Communication is achieved when my
conduct identifies this path with its own. (Merleau-Ponty , )
In Merleau-Ponty’s description, communication is gestural rather than
strictly linguistic. The other’s gestures ‘outline an intentional object’ in
the sense that I join him in his awareness of the object. This affects not
only what I see but also how I see it. The communication succeeds when
‘the powers of my body’ adjust themselves to both the intended object and
the fact that the other also intends it. In this case, the object becomes an
object for us and our powers rather than just for me and my powers. This is
why Merleau-Ponty in the same paragraph suggests that everything hap-
pens ‘as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his’
(Merleau-Ponty , ). A non-thematic awareness of the other guides
my awareness of the world.
Merleau-Ponty tends to stress how the two co-intenders act as a unity
effectively forming a single body in the form of what we might call an
‘intercorporeal self’, but Heidegger’s account of socially responsive fields of
possibilities also covers more agonistic relations. As Heidegger occasionally
puts it, being-with enables both our being-with-each-other [Miteinandersein]
and our being-against-each-other [Gegen- or Widereinandersein] (e.g., GA,
/; SZ, /, /; GA, f/). Consider, for instance, a
football player who, after a pass unexpected by the defence, can dribble
freely towards the goal. Now, suddenly and without him thinking about it, a
shadow appears at the perimeter of his perceptual field. The defender is by
no means a thematic object of the striker, yet his behaviour communicates
to the striker that he should move in the other direction from where he can
take a shot at the goal without fear of being tackled. The defender trans-
forms how the striker understands the playing field so that the striker is pre-
reflectively drawn to a different path.
When Heidegger, in the second quote above, speaks of the ‘the giving-
free and giving-away of the Da’ and the ‘manifest broken-open-ness’
(GA, ), he has this kind of responsiveness in mind. Being-with
means that we experience entities in relation to the behaviour of others,
as available for mutual use. This is a ‘broken-open-ness’ [Ausgebrochenheit],
because we are constitutively open towards others in this way, because they
step into and alter our realm of manifestation whether we like it or not.
 Holism and Relativism 
Returning to the initial formulation of joint attention, I remarked above
that it was not obvious how Heidegger’s claim that ‘one comports oneself
in the same way as the other’ complies with the differentiation condition
(GA, ). We can now see more clearly what he meant. The suggestion
is not that we have the exact same attitude (i.e., that both striker and
defender intend to shoot at the same goal to score for the same team and so
on) but that we comport ourselves in ontologically similar ways, that is, that
two people must both be constitutively open or responsive to the behav-
iour of others qua the holistic and temporal structure of their
understanding if they are to intend objects together. This complies with
the differentiation condition since the same transcendental structure, as
Heidegger understands it, is configured differently in accordance with the
thrownness or facticity of the individuals.
So, on the one hand, intentionality depends on social relations insofar as
we constantly adjust our understanding of objects in light of the behaviour
of other people. On the other hand, intentionality depends on objective
relations insofar as we constantly adjust our understanding of other people
in light of our shared environment. This way of putting things reveals just
how close Heidegger’s point is to Davidson’s idea of triangulation.
Triangulation, as Davidson uses the term, involves two creatures and an
object. Taken together, these three elements constitute a shared physical
environment. The idea is, then, that the two creatures ‘triangulate’ or
correlate each other’s behaviour with the physical environment in order to
make sense of each other. Through triangulation, they understand which
stimuli trigger which response. This process enables each of them to
understand the responses of the other. However, it also enables each
creature to discern the objective stimuli that cause its own responses, since
the triangulation with the other creature enables it to locate the stimulus in
a shared environment where it exists independently of its own mind.
Given that we cannot tell what is subjective without any notion of what
is objective, triangulation makes it possible for us to ‘know our own mind’,
as Davidson puts it (, Chapter ). The central idea behind triangu-
lation, which is shared by both Davidson and Heidegger, is that the two
directions of context-sensitivity belong together and that such context-
sensitivity is a necessary condition for having intentional states.
Davidson conjoins these two directions of externalism by invoking the
principle of charity. To understand the other, we must, first, ‘take the
speaker to be responding to the same feature of the world’ that we, as
interpreters, would respond to under similar circumstances (Davidson
, ). In addition, we must ‘discover a degree of logical consistency
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
in the thought of the speaker’ (Davidson , ). That is, we must
assume that the other’s attitude largely coheres with both the other
attitudes reasonably attributed to the other and with our own attitudes,
and we must assume that the other’s attitude depends causally on objects
in the world.
Davidson stresses that his argument
does not require (though of course it allows) a shared routine, but it does
depend on the interaction of at least two speaker-interpreters, for if I am
right, there would be no saying what a speaker was talking or thinking
about, no basis for claiming he could locate objects in an objective space
and time, without interaction with a second person. (Davidson , )
Heidegger agrees with this. We do not need shared conventions, rules, or
routines in order to become intelligible to one another but only this basic
responsiveness in and to a shared environment. Thus, in  he contrasts
the agreement of linguistic conventions (and, by extension, all types of
conventions) with what he calls an ‘originary, essential agreement’:
Words emerge from that essential agreement [wesenhaften Übereinkunft] of
human beings with one another, in accordance with which they are open in
their being with one another for the entities around them, which they can
then individually agree about – and this also means fail to agree about. Only
on the grounds of this originary, essential agreement is discourse possible in
its essential function: semainein, giving that which is understandable to
be understood. (GA/, f/)
For both Davidson and Heidegger, conventions are made possible by a basic
form of communication in which two people are jointly oriented towards a
shared environment in such a way that the behaviour of one person can make
certain features of the environment salient to the other person. ‘Essential
agreement’ is Heidegger’s version of Davidson’s principle of charity. It states
that each Dasein – to make sense of the world, of the other, and ultimately of
itself – must assume that the entities that it encounters are available to a
plurality of different usages and that other people comport themselves to the
same entities or range of entities that it does. Two Dasein involved in such
triangulation need not agree on which usage is correct. They can, as
Heidegger writes, fail to agree about this, but only if the essential agreement –
that is, the transcendental condition that they comport themselves in a
roughly similar way to the same entities – is already in place.


It is debated whether Davidson’s principle of charity is an epistemological or ontological principle.
Dreyfus and Charles Taylor have suggested that Davidson’s version of the principle of charity is an
 Holism and Relativism 
The preceding discussion, however, also shows that Heidegger and
Davidson, despite agreeing that self, other, and world are interdependent,
disagrees about the fundamental nature of intentionality. More specifi-
cally, they disagree about the role of language in triangulation.
For Davidson, triangulation provides the condition of possibility of the
propositional attitudes that are operative in linguistic utterances. It does so
in two ways. First, it enables people to know their own minds, to know
their own propositional attitudes, since ‘only communication with another
can supply an objective check’ and thus enable the person to distinguish
between ‘what is thought to be the case and what is the case’ (Davidson
, f ). Second, triangulation enables a person to attribute proposi-
tional attitudes to another person, because it is only when the observing
person ‘consciously correlates’ the responses of the other person with
objects in the world that it is possible to say that the other person responds
to this rather than that, for example, to the sound of a whistle rather than
an itch (Davidson , ).
Heidegger, on the contrary, rejects the traditional emphasis on propo-
sitional attitudes as is clear from his early (and rather confusing) discussion
of language. SZ suggests that traditional philosophy has taken the assertion
to have a privileged role in our access to the world and that this focus leads
to an occurrent ontology. In his terms, ‘occurrent determination
[Vorhandenheitsbestimmung] is . . . the speciality of assertion’ (SZ, /
). Some commentators take this to imply that the primary mode of
intentionality described by Heidegger is wholly independent of, if not
outright at odds with, a linguistic mode of intentionality. In other places,
however, Heidegger loosens the tight connection between assertion and

epistemological idea, according to which ‘the condition of my understanding you as you think and
act in your terms is that I construe you as making sense in my terms most of the time’ (Dreyfus &
Taylor , ; cf. Taylor ). In comparison, they argue that Gadamer’s equivalent, the fusion
of horizons, is ontological because it suggests that all human beings are always in contact with the
same reality even though they tend to see things differently. Different replies to the charge of
relativism follow from this contrast. The epistemological version of the principle of charity suggests
that an interpreter should simply and to the best of his ability translate the language of the other into
his own pre-existing idiom, while the more radical ontological version holds that understanding is
achieved only when a proper fusion of horizon has taken place thus effectively developing a new and
richer language (Dreyfus & Taylor , ). Others oppose such a reading and hold that
Davidson’s principle is both an ontological presupposition (i.e., the presupposition that two people
share a common world) and a methodological principle (that serves to constrain the possible
interpretations of a given behavioural pattern) (e.g. Malpas , Chapter , ). Heidegger,
on his part, clearly holds that triangulation and his version of the principle of charity is a constitutive,
ontological feature of Dasein qua being-with.

Dreyfus, for instance, writes that our primary level of understanding is ‘non-conceptual, non-
propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic’ (Dreyfus , ).
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
occurrentness by saying, for instance, that there are many ‘intermediate
gradations’ between circumspective understanding and theoretical asser-
tions (SZ, /) and by suggesting that assertions uncover entities as
‘either available or occurrent’ (SZ, /). What is the exact relation
between intentionality and language in (early) Heidegger? Which form of
communication is inherent to this form of triangulation? I cannot discuss
these far-reaching questions in detail here, but I will outline an answer that
enables us to, first, survey the difference between Heidegger and Davidson,
and, second, shed further light on the disagreement between Lafont
and PCI.
The object in Davidson’s analysis of radical interpretation is explicit
linguistic utterances, and when inquiring into the conditions that would
render foreign utterances meaningful to us, he argues that we must assume
these utterances to express a truth. Heidegger’s main interest lies, however,
not in truth-apt assertions but our practical and affective engagement with
the world. As Wrathall has noted, Heidegger would argue that Davidson,
due to his argumentative set-up, errs by ‘reading language’s propositional
structure back into all forms of human comportment’ (Wrathall ,
f ). Heidegger instead aims to account for a much wider range of
phenomena than Davidson. The communication he has in mind is, as
he puts it, ‘existential’ and ‘ontologically broad’ (SZ, /). This means
that rather than focusing directly on linguistic utterances – the totality of
which SZ calls simply language (SZ, /) – Heidegger is interested in
the broader issue of how significance ‘maintains itself in some definite way
of concernful being-with-one-another’ (SZ, /) or, in other words,
how significance is ‘“emphatically” shared’ with others (SZ, /).
Existential communication refers, hence, to the many ways in which our
behaviour not only responds to matrices of salience but also expresses these.
In other words, existential communication makes the matrices of salience,
which guide our comportment, manifest to others. Section . examines
this kind of communication or expression in more detail by analysing
Heidegger’s concept of discourse [Rede], but for now, it suffices to note
that the ontologically broad form of communication that provides the
foundation of Heidegger’s triangulation covers both non-linguistic behav-
iour (such as the gestures and the body-language described by Merleau-
Ponty) and explicit linguistic behaviour (including both performatives and


For helpful discussions of the role of assertions in SZ and its relation to the distinction between
availableness and occurrentness, see the critical discussions in Schear (), McManus (), and
Golob ().
 Holism and Relativism 
constantives) as well as everything in between (such as laughter and
disconcerted grunts) insofar as these expressions spring from and feed back
into matrices of salience.
As we saw above, the disagreement between Lafont and PCI concerns
the role of language in early Heidegger. To which extent does linguistic
meaning determine reference? Lafont reads the claim that ‘language is the
house of being’ back into the early Heidegger and takes this to mean that
his hermeneutic phenomenology is a form of linguistic constitutionalism
or idealism. The pragmatic conventionalist interpretation, on the other
hand, follows the early Heidegger in reserving the term ‘language’ for
explicit linguistic utterances. At first glance it might seem as if we face
an exclusive disjunction – either intentionality is pervaded by language all
the way down or it is wholly independent of it. Yet, in spelling out
Heidegger’s position we have to be very careful in distinguishing between
the different ways in which he uses the term ‘language’. As already noted,
SZ denies that language in the sense of the totality of linguistic utterances
used by a specific community constitutes intentionality. This alone con-
tradicts Lafont’s claim to linguistic idealism since her argument hinges on
the assumption that the difference between various ontic or natural lan-
guages (such as German or English) amounts to a difference between
understandings of being. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s argument implies that
the primary mode of intentionality is in some sense ‘expressive’ and that it
inherently ‘communicates’ with others. So, if we, on the other hand, use
the term ‘language’ to refer to any meaning articulating structure that is
inherently communicative or expressive, being-in-the-world is always
already a being-in-language (cf. Wrathall , Chapter ).
Heidegger’s holism implies that we constantly triangulate the shared
world with others. Although this form of triangulation often involves the
exchange of linguistic utterances, it does not necessarily do so. It is not
conditioned by shared linguistic conventions. Triangulation does, how-
ever, involve ‘communication’ in the ontologically broad sense: Dasein
constantly responds to and thereby expresses to others the particular
matrices of salience that it comports itself towards, and it constantly
responds to the matrices of salience expressed by the behaviour of others.
In the following, I will avoid the ambiguous term ‘language’ whenever
possible. Instead, I will use the terms ‘expression’ and ‘communication’ to


See also Guignon’s claim that for Heidegger ‘the articulation of intelligibility embedded in our
public languages extends across all dimensions of Dasein’s being’ so that ‘there is no exit from the
maze of language’ (, ).
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
refer to the (ontologically broad) way in which all purposeful behaviour has
the potential of making certain possibilities salient for other people.
Henceforth, the term ‘linguistic utterances’ refers to overt speech acts,
and ‘natural language’ refers to the totality of words and linguistic utter-
ances that are used by a specific and ontically identifiable community of
speakers. In this sense, linguistic utterances are (somewhat pace
Heidegger’s worry about assertions) for the most part expressive, but
expression and communication go beyond the exchange of linguistic
utterances. Seen in this light, the problem with Davidson’s account – as
well as Lafont’s critique of Heidegger – is that it takes linguistic utterances
to be the paradigm of meaningful communication, whereas Heidegger
broadens the scope of the argument to include all forms of expression.

. With Whom Do We Share the World?

I have established that Heidegger is an externalist in the sense that he takes
intentionality to be context-sensitive in the direction of objects and the
direction of other people. Dasein’s intentionality constitutively depends on
environmental objects in such a way that real-world entities constrain our
existential projections, and it constitutively depends on other people
because our manner of encountering entities is responsive to the behaviour
of others even when we are not thematically aware of them.
This double-sided context-sensitivity is a form of holism in which self,
others, and objects belong together in an interpretative nexus.
Consequently, there is never just one way of interpreting things. This does
not entail relativism because the social externalism of Dasein is not a
function of a robust social formation like that of a shared convention.
Instead, Heidegger is an open-ended social externalist committed to the
idea that the whole of significance that guides the comportment of one
individual is constitutively responsive to other individuals even if they live
in different wholes of significance.
If we combine this open-ended social externalism with object external-
ism, we arrive at the following account of what it is for people to share a
world:
Two individuals, A and B, share the world with each other symmetrically if
and only if
()(a) A comports himself in accordance with a whole of significance that is
responsive to the behaviour of B, and (b) B comports himself in accordance
with a whole of significance that is responsive to the behaviour of A,
 Holism and Relativism 
()(a) A tacitly assumes B to be capable of comporting himself towards the
same entities as A and (b) B tacitly assumes A to be capable of comporting
himself towards the same entities as B.
The first condition expresses the idea that the comportmental differenti-
ation expressed in and through Dasein’s behaviour is an integral part of
how others, in the phenomenological vicinity, comport themselves
towards entities. Once I understand that you pursue certain possibilities,
this is bound to affect what our shared environment affords from me. The
second condition states that it is a transcendental constraint on my object-
awareness that I take the objects to which I comport myself to be available
to a plurality of agents. It is a constitutive feature of our way of experienc-
ing or disclosing entities that we tacitly assume that the same entities relate
and separate us at the same time.
Heidegger’s holism implies that intentionality is constitutively respon-
sive to others in such a way that whoever steps into our realm of manifes-
tation will alter the field of possibilities that guides our understanding.
Following this thought, intersubjectivity is, at bottom, the possibility of
different polarisations of the same matrix of salience, of the same field of
entities. The point of pre-reflective triangulation is, hence, that our differ-
ent existential projections are constantly in interaction with each other,
and that rather than fragmenting the world into distinct bodies of entities
relative to cultural or social groups, we simply see the same things differ-
ently. In this sense, meaning is indeterminate albeit shareable in
its indeterminacy.
We see these commitments at work if we return to Heidegger’s example
with the Senegalese. It follows from the discussion above that the two
people can intend the same entities in ontologically similar ways. Object
externalism is built into the encounter from the outset so that each person
takes the other person to be engaged with the same environmental objects
that they are. This does not imply that the two people relate to their shared
environment as a domain of brute facts. Rather, they both engage with
their environment based on a preceding understanding of the world as a
relational whole. This holism explains why one person sees the entity as a
lectern, while the other sees it as, say, a shield against arrows. This satisfies
the holist’s differentiation condition. To avoid the charge of relativism,
their respective interpretations must concern the same entity. They must,
hence, be susceptible to modifying their respective interpretations in light
of how the other interprets the entity. Their respective interpretations
must be open to revisions. Heidegger’s specific account of social external-
ism ensures this feature. If meaning depended only on those with whom
 Being-In-the-World And Being-With
we share conventions, there would be no way of accounting for such
modifications. We have seen, however, that Heidegger believes a more
fundamental form of sociality underlies conventional usage, and that our
object-awareness is characterised by a non-thematic awareness that the
same entity can be used in many ways. The German Professor and the
Senegalese share unconcealment in the sense that their relation to entities
puts them into relation with each other while also separating them.
In the example, the German Professor comes to see the lectern not
simply in light of the usage characteristic of the social practices that he is
socialised into. With the appearance of the Senegalese, the same entity now
also appears in light of the possibility of being used as a shield against
arrows. The entity is not duplicated into a thing-for-me and a thing-for-you,
an a and a. Rather, the same entity, the same a that used to appear in
light of a single usage, a as b, is now released for a mutual usage, a as b
and b. It appears as lectern and a shield against arrows. The Senegalese
reconfigures the field of possibilities of the German Professor so that the
same entity appears in a new teleological structure with different in-order-
to’s and different for-the-sake-of’s.
Our understanding is typically shaped by conventional interpretative
schemas, but it is not, pace PCI and Lafont, fully determined by
conventions. Heidegger’s account of social externalism is much more
dynamic than this. The field of possibilities of each Dasein is fundamen-
tally responsive to the behaviour of the other Dasein. We can for instance
easily imagine that the German Professor after a while realises that the
Senegalese sees the lectern as a specific tool that has no German (or
English) equivalent. Doing this would amount to him adjusting his field
of possibilities to fit the behaviour of the Senegalese in ways that are not
outlined by conventions. He would then see the lectern in light of the
possibilities made salient by the behaviour of the Senegalese, even if these
possibilities were to him unnamed and unfamiliar. The same thing goes, of
course, for the Senegalese trying to understand the entity in relation to the
behaviour of the German Professor.
Communication between people does not require shared conventions.
Rather, communication is, at bottom, a form of pre-reflective
triangulation. On this account, the two Dasein in the example are indeed
capable of revising their initial understanding of being. Their
understanding of being is modified and nuanced through the interpretative
resistance offered by the behaviour of the other. It follows from the holistic
interdependence between the different dimensions of human existence
that this revision not only concerns the other person as a thematic object
 Holism and Relativism 
but also sheds new light on the environmental objects shared by the two of
them and ultimately how they understand themselves.
Taken as a philosophical thesis rather than a common-sense triviality,
the idea that different people live in different worlds should be rejected.
There cannot be a plurality of worlds, because the world is individuated
neither by social practices nor by linguistic communities. In fact, the world
is not individuated because the world is not an entity. The world knows no
borders. Like a horizon, it is expandable and ever-retreating. We can,
however, speak of a plurality of perspectives, but these perspectives are
interdependent perspectives on the same world rather than ontologically
separate spheres.
  
Forms of Being-With
  

Interpersonal Understanding

We have seen Heidegger argue that sociality constitutes a dimension of the

world that affects all Dasein’s forms of intentionality and not just our
concrete face-to-face encounters. Now, however, we will turn to interper-
sonal understanding itself. How does Heidegger’s a priori determination of
human sociality as founded in the shared world shed light on the concrete
understanding that arises between people in everyday life?
People often fault Heidegger for having nothing to say about face-to-
face encounters. Sartre, for example, asserts that being-with ‘can be of
absolutely no use in resolving the psychological, concrete problem of the
recognition of the Other’ (Sartre , ). Similarly, Carman writes that
‘Being and Time seems to offer no account of this other-oriented dimen-
sion of selfhood’ and that Heidegger ‘was wrong to ignore those aspects of
sociality that inevitably mingle and complicate our first-person under-
standings with our understandings of others’ (Carman , ).
While this critique is understandable, given the fact that Heidegger’s
account of interpersonal understanding is both terse and scattered
throughout his work, it is ultimately misguided. If Heidegger’s comments
on our understanding of concrete others seem awfully indirect, this is only
because he conceptualises intersubjectivity not as a relation between two
independent subjects but as specific crystallisation of our shared being-in-
the-world. He claims, in short, that our ability to understand others
presupposes pre-reflective triangulation.
Formulated in terms of triangulation, object-awareness was the vertex in
focus in the last chapter with self- and other-awareness being the base
angles of the triangle. Now we must focus on the vertex of other-awareness
without forgetting that it is intrinsically connected to self- and object-
awareness. What characterises our concrete encounters with innerworldly
entities that are ontologically like ourselves? Which type of understanding
pertains to our fellow Dasein, and how does it differ from the type of


 Forms of Being-With
understanding appropriate to non-Dasein-like entities like hammers and
stones?
In posing these questions, we enter the domain of social cognition.
Heidegger was highly critical of the theories of social cognition of his time,
and he would be equally critical of the theories of social cognition currently
in vogue. I thus start by outlining the historical and contemporary debates
on social cognition, so that we can more easily map the positions that
Heidegger opposes (Section .). I then reconstruct the arguments that he
did (or could have) formulated against these positions (Section .).
Drawing on these arguments, I spell out four conditions for a successful
theory of social cognition that I argue are all satisfied by the concept of
‘transpositioning’ developed in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
(Section .). I, then, consider (and reject) the claim that our ability to
recognise others as Dasein constitutes something like a Heideggerian ethics
(Section .) before I finally discuss how our understanding of nonhuman
animals compares to interpersonal understanding (Section .).

. Theories of Social Cognition

Two different contexts will clarify the accounts of social cognition that
Heidegger opposes and thus put into relief the position that he does
endorse. The first context is the accounts that were prominent at
Heidegger’s time – Mill’s argument from analogy, Lipps’ account of
empathy, and the phenomenological empathy theories found in Husserl,
Scheler, and Stein. The second context is the contemporary debate
between simulation theory of mind, theory theory of mind, and the
perceptual account of other minds developed by contemporary phenom-
enologists and enactivists.

.. The Historical Context

John Stuart Mill’s argument from analogy is a locus classicus:
I conclude that other human beings have feelings like me, because, first,
they have bodies like me, which I know, in my own case, to be the
antecedent condition of feelings; and because, secondly, they exhibit the
acts, and other outward signs, which in my own case I know by experience
to be caused by feelings. (Mill , )
Mill argues that I know from myself that a certain type of behaviour, B, is
caused by a mental state, M. Another person can exhibit the same kind of
 Interpersonal Understanding 
behaviour, B. He assumes that similar behaviour must be caused by similar
mental states. Therefore, the other person’s behaviour, B, is caused by a
mental state, M. We can thus infer mental states from behaviour by
assuming that others are psychologically like ourselves.
Many consider Mill’s argument unsound. For the phenomenological
movement, Theodor Lipps’ criticism was decisive. Lipps argues, first,
against the first premise (that I know my own behaviour to be caused by
my mental states) that I normally do not see my behaviour like I see others’
behaviour, but only experience it from within. If this is the case, I do not
see my behaviour as behaviour since behaviour is ordinarily conceived as
something observed from a third-person perspective. My own experience
is, hence, insufficient to account for the connection between mental states
and behaviour. Second, recognising the Cartesian presupposition that my
mental states are given non-inferentially to me and me alone, Lipps takes
issue with the analogical inference by arguing that I only know my anger
and that it is something completely different to know your anger since your
anger would not be given to me in the only way that I know mental states
to be given, namely, non-inferentially and non-observationally.
Inspired by the concept of sympathy developed by David Hume and
Adam Smith, Lipps develops a non-cognitive approach to what he calls
empathy [Einfühlung]. He argues that we have an innate instinct for
imitation [Trieb der Nachahmung] so that whenever we see a particular
process going in the body of another (e.g., yawning), we are inclined to
produce a corresponding bodily process in ourselves. Further, our own
bodily processes correspond to emotional states. Hence, when we produce
a corresponding bodily process, we also undergo the emotional state that
typically accompanies this process. Being perceptually aware that the
process originates in the other rather than ourselves, we then project the
emotional state produced in us into him or her (Lipps ). Lipps thus
takes empathy to be a psychologically basic mechanism of resonance-
projection, where a person perceives an object that resonates with her
own experience in such a way that she projects her experience into
this object.
Agreeing with Lipps’ rejection of the argument from inference, phe-
nomenologists like Stein and Husserl adopt the terminology of empathy or
Einfühlung. Doing so, however, they make sure to distance themselves


Husserl often uses the term empathy, but he also finds it problematic for the reasons identified below
(cf. Husserl a, ff ). Scheler completely rejected the term empathy in order to avoid confusing
his own approach with Lipps’. Instead, he talks of Nachfühlen, which is sometimes translated into
 Forms of Being-With
from the details of his account. Specifically, they take issue with the idea
that empathy requires a form of imitation on several grounds. First, the
model of imitation presupposes that I am already familiar with the con-
nection between bodily process and emotion before I can recognise it in
someone else. Yet, as Scheler points out, ‘we can understand the experience
of animals, though even in “tendency” we cannot imitate their manner of
expression; for instance when a dog expresses its joy by barking and
wagging its tail, or a bird by twittering’ (Scheler , ). It seems, then,
that we can understand other creatures even when we do not recognise
their expressions from ourselves and when we cannot imitate the gesture.
Second, Stein argues that empathy does not require that I undergo the
same experience as the other. Instead, empathy is characterised by a
fundamental difference between the experience of the empathiser and
the experience of the object of empathy. Empathy requires a distinction
between self and other that Lipps, on Stein’s reading, glosses over.
Arguably, Lipps describes the wrong phenomenon by mistaking empathy
(Einfühlung) for a feeling-of-oneness (Einsfühlung) (Stein , f ).
Third, the phenomenologists criticise Lipps for presupposing what he is
supposed to prove, namely, our basic recognition of other creatures as
minded. The problem is that Lipps’ theory presupposes that we can
successfully distinguish between those bodily movements that are expres-
sive of mental states (e.g., the clinching of a fist) and those bodily
movements that are not expressive of mental states (e.g., a rock tumbling
down a mountain side). For Lipps, this is the initial stimulus that triggers
our instinct for imitation. Yet, this basic capacity for recognising other
creatures as minded is what needs clarification. As Scheler notes, ‘imitation,
even as a mere “tendency”, already presupposes some kind of acquaintance
with the other’s experience, and therefore cannot explain what it is here
supposed to do’ (Scheler , )

“vicarious feeling” or “reproduced feeling.” These translations are, however, misleading since
Scheler’s point is exactly, pace Lipps, that we do not replicate the experience undergone by the
other. “In Nachfühlen we sense the quality of the other’s feeling, without it being transmitted to us,
or evoking a similar emotion in us” (Scheler , ). Despite these terminological hesitations,
I follow Zahavi () in classifying both Husserl’s, Stein‘s, and Scheler’s respective positions as
empathy theories.

Karsten Stueber argues that Stein‘s reading of Lipps is uncharitable and that Lipps does indeed take
self-other distinction to be a necessary part of empathy (Stueber , ), but even if we grant this
point, Lipps’ theory still seems to conflate empathy with what is today called emotional sharing, that
is, a case where several subjects share isomorphic emotional states while maintaining self/other
distinction. For a taxonomy of social emotions, see Scheler (, ff ); for a contemporary
discussion of the distinction between emotional sharing and empathy, see Zahavi and Rochat
().
 Interpersonal Understanding 
Phenomenological theories of empathy claim that our knowledge of
others requires neither inference nor simulation. Instead, empathy is a sui
generis type of intentional act that provides us with direct access to others’
mental states in a perception-like way (e.g., Stein , ). We ‘believe
ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person’s joy in his laughter,
with his sorrow and pain in his tears’ (Scheler , , my italics). There
is some disagreement in the phenomenological tradition about how exactly
to describe the relation between the empathiser and the object of empathy.
Scheler argues that ‘everyone can apprehend the experience of his fellow-
men just as directly (or indirectly) as he can his own’ (Scheler , ),
while Stein and Husserl believe that the relation is essentially asymmetrical
because the empathiser has a ‘primordial [originär]’ access to her own
mental states that she lacks when it comes to the mental life of the other.
As an experience of a foreign consciousness, empathy is defined by Stein as
‘the non-primordial experience which announces a primordial one’ (Stein
, ). Nevertheless, what is common to phenomenological empathy
theories is that they conceive of empathy neither as inference nor reso-
nance but as a form of direct perception.

.. The Contemporary Context

Let us briefly turn to the contemporary debate on social cognition. The
dominant approaches either take social cognition to involve some kind of
theoretical inference or some kind of emotional or imaginative simulation.
Using the term ‘theory of mind’ to designate the ability to attribute mental
states to others, the first approach is known as the theory theory of mind,
while the second is known as the simulation theory of mind. The theo-
retical landscape is complex, and there are multiple branches of both
theory theory and simulation theory as well as many hybrid theories, but
for the present discussion, a rough outline suffices.
Theory theorists believe that social cognition is a theoretical operation
in which a subject uses an implicit or tacit body of knowledge to predict
and explain the behaviour of others. This body of knowledge is sometimes
assumed to be innate (Baron-Cohen ; Carruthers ; Scholl &
Leslie ), while others take it to be a law-like generalisation constructed
in early infancy (Gopnik & Meltzoff ; Gopnik & Wellman ,
). The central claim is that we understand others by making infer-
ences based on general principles (a ‘folk psychology’) that connect certain
mental states with certain patterns of behaviour and certain
sensory stimuli.
 Forms of Being-With
Simulation theory rejects that social cognition requires an internal
system of knowledge that is structured like a theory. Instead, they argue
that we use our own mental processes to model or simulate the mental
processes of others by imagining how we would feel or what we would
think if we were in a similar position, although there is some disagreement
about what exactly the mental simulation requires of us. Some argue
that you must imagine the other person in his or her situation (Gordon
), while others hold that you must imagine yourself in the situation of
the other person (Goldman ). Nevertheless, the main point is
that we understand others by using our own mental mechanisms to
simulate theirs. This approach is quite similar to the one proposed by
Lipps, who is sometimes read as a proto-simulation theorist
(e.g., Goldman ).
Revitalising the work of Husserl, Scheler, and Stein, contemporary
research in phenomenology and enactivism has criticised theory theory for
being overly cognitivistic and simulation theory for mistaking empathy for
emotional sharing. Instead, they claim that mental state attribution is the
result of our perception of expressions and gestures (Gallagher b,
a; Krueger & Overgaard ; Varga ; Zahavi ).
Underlying this perceptual account is the rejection of the Cartesian pre-
suppositions that are arguably common to both theory theory and simu-
lation theory. Specifically, the perceptual account rejects that other minds
are hidden and inaccessible, arguing instead that mental states are indeed
perceivable in expressions and gestures. Following this line of thought,
empathy refers not to situations in which two subjects share an emotional
state but the type of intentional act that enables a subject to distinguish
minded from non-minded creatures.
Another branch of research, enactivism, has also recently put into
question the cognitivist assumption of theory theory and simulation theory
(De Jaegher & Di Paolo ; De Jaegher & Froese ). In particular,
they, like the phenomenologists, argue that we usually do not approach
other people in an observational third-person stance, where we collect and
process behavioural information (De Jaegher et al. ; Gallagher &
Hutto ). Instead, they argue that cognitive processes are essentially
tied to embodiment and embeddedness within an environment.
Accordingly, they believe that ‘social understanding is not realised by
“snapshot” activities of one individual’s theorising or simulating but arises
in the moment-to-moment interaction of two subjects’ (Fuchs & De
Jaegher , ).
 Interpersonal Understanding 

. Heidegger’s Critique of Social Cognition

Although many of his points apply to other theories of social cognition,
Heidegger mainly discusses the notion of empathy. This comes as no
surprise since theories of empathy were predominant in the phenomeno-
logical circles that Heidegger himself was part of. Heidegger’s stance
towards empathy is quite dismissive. SZ claims that empathy provides
‘the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject, which is initially
given by itself, to the other subject, which is initially quite inaccessible’
(SZ, /). This presupposes that the subject is initially isolated or
‘encapsulated within itself’ (GA, /; cf. GA, ), which, of
course, flies in the face of Heidegger’s holistic conception of subjectivity as
transcendence, as already being ‘out’ amongst objects and other people.
For this reason, ‘the problem of empathy is just as absurd as the question
of the reality of the external world’ (GA, /).
At times, however, Heidegger adopts a more moderate stance towards
the issue of empathy. In  he thus admits that even though he does not
like the term Einfühlung, because it suggests that the other subject is a
container that we must somehow get ‘into’, the ‘ontological problem of
empathy’ persists and that our ability to understand one another still
requires a ‘phenomenal clarification’ (GA, /). Further, he con-
cedes in SZ that we do need ‘the special hermeneutics of empathy’ on some
occasions, for example, when we must understand a stranger or someone
who deliberately tries to close himself off to us (SZ, /).
To complicate matters further, it is not always clear which position
Heidegger’s critique targets. He occasionally mentions Husserl’s notion of
empathy (e.g., GA, , ), but often he describes the process of
empathy in a way that is much closer to how Lipps conceives it. For this
reason, many commentators misjudge Heidegger’s arguments. Some over-
emphasise the force and scope of the argument. McMullin, for instance,
argues that Heidegger’s problem with ‘theories of empathy’ is that they
characterise ‘the sociality of the self in terms of the individual’s “pre”-social
qualities or capacities – qualities that are then simply mapped onto other
persons and social contexts after the fact’ (McMullin , ). While this
might be true for Lipps, who, as we recall, believes that we utilise our own
mental mechanisms in simulation, and for the various inferential theories,
it is questionable that the same point holds against Husserl, Scheler, and
Stein as they take empathy to be a sui generis intentional act. If we conflate
these two positions, we end up mischaracterising Heidegger’s approach to
 Forms of Being-With
social cognition, since it, as I will show, shares some crucial features with
the accounts developed by Scheler and Stein despite Heidegger’s attempt
to distance himself from them.
Other commentators underestimate the argument by taking
Heidegger’s mentioning of the ‘special hermeneutics of empathy’ to be
some kind of unsubstantiated endorsement (cf. Agosta ; Hatab ).
Hatab supports this reading by claiming that the critique of empathy is
solely directed at Lipps’ theory of projection (Hatab ). This approach
misses the fact that there are significant differences between Heidegger’s
account of social cognition and that of the other phenomenologists.
Before we can fully appreciate his positive account of interpersonal
understanding, we must first clarify what is at stake in Heidegger’s often
polemical remarks against competing theories. In the following, I identify
six different objections raised against what he takes to be traditional
theories of social cognition. I then reconstruct the underlying and often
implicit arguments that support each objection and consider who might be
its target.

() Theories of social cognition tend to reduce the other to the self.
Heidegger claims that empathy conceives of interpersonal understanding in
such a way that the relation one has towards others ‘becomes a projection
[Projektion] of one’s own being toward oneself “into an other”’ (SZ, /
, my italics). This suggests that in empathy we primarily understand
ourselves only to transfer this understanding into the other. But then the
other becomes a mere ‘duplicate of the self’ (SZ, /), because we, as
empathisers, only find in the other what we have put there ourselves. On
this model, the empathiser E simulates a set of mental states M that are then
projected into the object of empathy O. In this case, however, E only ever
reaches his own mental states, ME, rather than the mental states of O, MO.
Heidegger here construes empathy as an emotional simulation, where
the self understands the other mind by constructing a model of what the
object feels or thinks in a situation out of its own psychological mecha-
nisms. Understood historically, the target is clearly Lipps, as Heidegger
also indicates by referring to the term projection. Today, Goldman’s
description of social cognition as ‘simulation-plus-projection’ (Goldman
, ) also seems to fit the bill.

() Theories of social cognition tend to reduce the self to the other.
Elsewhere, Heidegger argues the reverse point by saying that some theories
reduce the self to the other by requiring that we substitute ourselves for the
 Interpersonal Understanding 
object of empathy, that we ‘take its place’ and imagine that we are in the
others’ shoes (e.g., GA/, /). This shift in perspective requires,
however, that ‘we could somehow vacate our own position and directly fill
out and occupy the place of that [other] entity’ (GA/, /).
While formulated rather polemically, Heidegger’s point is that some
theories of social cognition require that the empathiser has identical mental
states to the object of empathy, that the empathiser reproduces the mental
states of the other as if they were his or her own. E would then substitute
his own mental states, ME, for the mental states of O, MO. In contrast,
Heidegger says that there can be no understanding of the other if the one
who wishes to understand ‘relinquishes himself in advance’ (GA/,
/). He firmly believes that social cognition implies self/other-
distinction.
Heidegger’s use of references is, as always, sparing. He might have in
mind Kant’s second paralogism, which holds that ‘[i]t is obvious that if one
wants to represent a thinking being, one must put oneself in its place, and
thus substitute one’s own subject for the object one wants to consider’
(Kant , A–A). Alternatively, Heidegger might simply be mak-
ing the same point as the one we saw Stein make against Lipps, when she
charged him for confusing Einfühlung with Einsfühlung, empathy with a
feeling-of-oneness. In the contemporary debate, some simulation theorists
do insist that social cognition requires the substitution of the self for the
other. Gordon, for instance, believes that empathy requires not a transfer-
ring of a mental state from one person to another but a personal transfor-
mation (Gordon , ) in which the empathiser, as a distinct
individual, ‘cease[s] to be the referent of the first person pronoun’ in such
a way that his or her personal characteristics are ‘out of the picture
altogether’ (Gordon , ). In contrast to (), the aim of simulation
is that I imagine that I am you rather than you are me.

() Theories of social cognition tend to be too cognitively demanding.

Heidegger also considers another form of social cognition where we,
instead of actually vacating our own place by reproducing the mental
states of the other, do so only in thought, acting ‘as if we were the other’
(GA/, /). But this description is dubious when we take the
phenomenology into account. Our everyday understanding of others rarely
involves such a cognitive simulation nor does it involve a set of conscious
inferences. ‘[T]he experience of foreign as well as my own “psychic life”
[Seelenlebens] does not first need a reflection on lived experience’
(GA, /). Rather, ‘the presence of others [Mitda] in the
 Forms of Being-With
environing world is wholly immediate, inconspicuous, obvious; [it is]
similar to the character of the presence of world-things [Weltdinge]’
(GA, /).
This objection targets the argument from analogy and theory theory,
but it also seems to hold against some forms of simulation theory.
Goldman (), for instance, argues that the empathiser E must ‘quar-
antine’ his own believes and desires , ME, and then simulate those of the
other, MO, in a form of ‘pretend state’ driven by conscious imagination
and inferences, and then transfer MO to O.
In contrast, Heidegger emphasises that our understanding of others is
immediate in the same way that our understanding of things is, and that
there is no recourse to cognitively demanding inferences. Along similar
lines, we saw that traditional and contemporary phenomenology takes
empathy to be a form of perception. We could, hence, classify
Heidegger’s approach to other minds as perceptual, although, as I will
show briefly, we should keep in mind that he takes perception to be
practical perceiving as informed by a holistic background.

() Theories of social cognition tend to presuppose the phenomenon that they
are supposed to explain.
In a lecture course from , Heidegger claims that
[t]he idea of empathy and projection already presuppose being-with the
other and the being of the other with me. Both already presuppose that one
has already understood the other as another human being; otherwise,
I would be projecting something into the void. (GA, /)
The point is that we can only empathically project something into the
other if we are already aware that the entity in front of us possesses
intentional states. If we lacked this basic understanding, we might as well
project mental states into coffee cups and tables. From this point of view, it
seems that empathy presupposes the phenomenon that it is supposed to
explain, namely, our basic recognition of other people as minded creatures.
This line of argument seems to target Lipps and, in a contemporary
context, simulation theory, but not Heidegger’s fellow phenomenologists.
Above we saw Scheler make the same argument against Lipps.

() Theories of social cognition tend to presuppose a phenomenologically

flawed conception of mental states.
The next issue concerns the very focus on mental state attribution com-
mon to most of the described approaches to social cognition. In
 Interpersonal Understanding 
Heidegger’s view, we should be careful not to explain the being of others in
terms of ‘the “subject” or the “person” in the sense in which this is taken
conceptually in philosophy’ (GA, /). The reasoning is that we tend to
define ‘subject’ and ‘person’ as entities that have an inner realm of mental states
and that we, following Descartes, understand mental states as independent of
external, worldly factors. Heidegger senses this Cartesianism in the very term
Einfühlung, which suggests, as he likes to point out, that we must somehow feel
our way into the other (e.g., GA, /; GA/, /).
His counterproposal draws on his holistic conception of intentional
states. Instead of understanding the other by somehow accessing his ‘inner’
mental realm, Heidegger argues that ‘I understand him through the world
in which he is with me, a world which is discovered and understandable
through the regard in being-with-one-another’ (GA, /). The
Cartesian tradition assumes that mental states are ordinarily identified
through introspection. Heidegger, on the other hand, holds that mental
states are individuated through our practical engagement with the world.
A specific part of this practical engagement, namely, the for-the-sake-of
relations, constitutes non-thematic self-awareness. Extending this line of
reasoning to our understanding of others, Heidegger now argues that the
minds of others are not initially inaccessible as the Cartesian tradition
claims. Rather, intentional states are determined by the interplay between
in-order-to’s and for-the-sake-of’s and can, hence, be read off the practical
comportments of others as these are embodied or expressed in their
behaviour. This makes Heidegger a proto-enactivist.
Rejecting the assumption that mental states are ordinarily only accessi-
ble through introspection, Heidegger effectively dissolves the traditional
problem of other minds, which, arguably, underlies both the argument
from inference, Lipps’ empathy, theory theory, and simulation theory. We
need neither inference nor simulation if mental states can simply be read
off O’s behaviour in a quasi-perceptual way.
What about the other phenomenologists? Scheler and Stein take a step
in the same anti-Cartesian direction when claiming that the distinction
between mind and body is an artificial construct that rests on a more
primordial conception of ‘the total unity of the “animate” body’ (Scheler
, ) or the ‘psycho-physical individual’ (Stein , ). They
challenge the Cartesian concept of mental states by claiming that expres-
sive acts allow us to perceive what is traditionally considered private and
inaccessible (e.g., Stein , ff ).
But in Heidegger’s view, their anti-Cartesian is not radical enough.
They might have torn down the wall between the mind and the body,
 Forms of Being-With
but taking the mind/body-unity to be self-explanatory, they leave a wall
between individual and world still standing. In other words, they fail to
question the Cartesian dogma according to which intentional states are
independent of factors external to the individual. For Heidegger, in
contrast, even the lived body is only intelligible by virtue of its practical
engagement in the world: ‘[E]ven when the others are encountered . . . “in
the flesh”, in their bodily presence . . . I meet the other in the field, at
work, on the street . . . He is appresented in his fellow Dasein by his world
or by our common environment’ (GA, /). Heidegger believes
that intentional states depend on their physical and social environment in a
way that is insufficiently taken into account by the phenomenology of
empathy.
One might object that empathy merely constitutes the most fundamen-
tal form of intersubjectivity and that the idea of a shared world or
environment is made possible by empathy. This is what I earlier called
Husserl’s first path to intersubjectivity, and it leads us to Heidegger’s
final point.

() Theories of social cognition tend to wrongfully make face-to-face relations

the foundation of social life.
Whereas () makes the phenomenological claim that most accounts of
social cognition miss a crucial feature of how we ordinarily experience
others by neglecting to show how intentional states depend on the world,
() concerns the idea that dyadic relations are explanatorily prior to
relations to the shared world.
The idea that all forms of social life are built on top of the dyadic
relation between distinctly embodied agents is appealing due to its parsi-
mony. However, if we grant objection (), that the shared world shapes
how we understand others, there is no phenomenological reason for granting
the dyadic relation this priority. Indeed, the things themselves seem to
speak against this model. The priority granted to the dyadic relation must

Schütz makes a similar point when claiming that it is “essential to the face-to-face situation that you
and I have the same environment” in the form of a “motivational context,” where we respond not
only to shared environmental objects but also to each other’s actions and motivations (Schütz ,
–)

Zahavi argues that Husserl is actually rather close to Heidegger on this point. He quotes Husserl
saying that “conjointly with the empathic experience of the other the following peculiarity accrues:
when comprehending his experiencing, my experience normally passes through his experiencing and
reaches all the way through to what he experiences” (Hua , , quoted in Zahavi , ).
This line of argument is indeed compatible with Husserl’s first path to intersubjectivity that takes
open intersubjectivity to be more foundational than empathy.
 Interpersonal Understanding 
then be motivated by some other philosophical commitment. There are
several ways to construe this, but Heidegger usually identifies and puts into
question two such commitments.
First, we might give privilege to the dyadic relation if we presuppose an
atomistic conception of the mind. The reasoning is that if we assume that
the defining features of subjectivity, whatever they are, do not constitu-
tively depend on social relations, it becomes necessary to postulate a special
mental operation to explain the existence of social structures. Only a
special psychological mechanism can establish relations between suppos-
edly pre-social selves. On this view, empathy is foundational because it
bridges initially self-contained subjects.
Second, we might give privilege to the dyadic relation if we assume that
the theoretical attitude is our primary relation to the world. In the
theoretical attitude, we approach the world as if it were void of our specific
cares and concerns; we try our best to perceive things independently of our
own existential projections. This results in a specific conception of reality
as occurrent. Yet, if reality is primarily a domain of available entities, it
becomes necessary to postulate a special mental operation that transforms
the star-shaped bags of blood and bone that we occasionally encounter into
people with minds of their own. In this view, a special psychological
mechanism is required for us to get from the objective world of the
theoretical attitude to the social world given in everyday life.
Both commitments are somewhat supported by a Cartesian quest for
scientific certainty. Regarding the latter, certainty is, after all, the ideal of
the theoretical attitude. Regarding the former, Descartes’ methodological
doubt and his reliance on introspection took him straight to a form of
solipsistic immanence. Although Husserl is ambiguous regarding the claim
that empathy is foundational for social life, Heidegger reads his general


One might object that Heidegger misses an obvious third commitment that might also support the
idea that the dyadic relation is foundational: Empirical evidence shows that the infant-caretaker
relation is developmentally crucial. This suggests that reciprocal relations between child and parent is
developmentally prior to various group formations. In reply, we should recall two things. First, the
issue being discussed here is not which phenomena is developmentally prior but whether the dyadic
relation is logically or explanatorily prior to the relation to the shared world. Second, Heidegger does
not endorse the collectivist thesis that a sense of us (e.g., a unity or fusion between child and caretaker)
is prior to the self/other distinction. These points help us formulate Heidegger’s retort: The point is
that the self/other distinction logically presupposes that self and other share a world, that is, that there
is a common medium in which self and other can understand each other. In Chapter , I argue that
once we have the basic structure of a fundamentally shared world in which agents act pre-reflectively
and purposefully, we also have the possibility of the agents acting pre-reflectively and purposefully
together. This is the case, I believe, even if robust forms of collectivism (i.e., the sense of us of group
biases) are developmental latecomers compared to reciprocal recognition.
 Forms of Being-With
approach to the issue as supported by such quasi-Cartesian commitments.
According to him, Husserl’s conception of empathy fails () because it
remains bound to an idealist and egological sphere, and () because it
remains oriented towards ‘pure thing- and data-experience rather than
concrete relations of existence’ (GA, ).
If we abandon these commitments, we must, according to Heidegger,
also abandon the idea that the dyadic relation is foundational. As we saw,
Heidegger does indeed oppose both of them. He endorses a holistic
conception of the mind and takes practical comportment to be the
paradigmatic form of intentionality. Instead of grasping sociality by adding
a special mental operation to a preconceived self, Heidegger argues that our
understanding of others is cut from the same holistic cloth as our under-
standing of ourselves. ‘Since in understanding world the relations of the in-
order-to, of involvement and for-the-sake-of are understood, it is essen-
tially self-understanding . . .. Contained in this, again, there is the under-
standing of being-with-others’ (GA, f/). As a holistically
constituted world-enmeshed agent, the self is already radically out there
among others in a way that is presupposed by rather than derived from the
face-to-face relation.

. Transpositioning
Taking stock, points ()–() are most likely formulated with Lipps’
empathy theory and Mill’s argument from analogy in mind, but
Heidegger’s critique also applies to the contemporary debate between
theory theory and simulation theory. Somewhat surprisingly, Heidegger
rejects inference and simulation on the same ground as Husserl, Scheler,
and Stein. It would, however, be wrong to count Heidegger among the
phenomenological empathy theorists. He believes that his fellow phenom-
enologists fail to completely deconstruct the Cartesian conception of the
subject because they take the face-to-face relationship between two
embodied subjects to be intelligible apart from its practical engagement
in a physical and social environment. In this sense, Heidegger is closer to
modern-day enactivism. Finally, Heidegger opposes the claim, widespread

Despite the similarities between him and Heidegger (see note  above), Schütz remains loyal to
Husserl’s second path in claiming that the face-to-face relation is foundational for social life (e.g.,
Schütz , ). This causes him to claim that other social formations, like that of anonymous
social norms, are secondary to and derived from face-to-face relations, while Heidegger maintains
that a truly phenomenological approach sees the face-to-face relations as unintelligible apart from a
shared context and as already imbued with social norms.
 Interpersonal Understanding 
also among contemporary phenomenologists, that empathy is foundational
for social life on the ground that this leads to a problematic social
ontological layer theory (cf. Section .).
From this discussion, we can distil four conditions that a successful
theory of social cognition must satisfy according to Heidegger:
() The immediacy condition: Social cognition must be so construed as to
account for the fact that we ordinarily understand other minds in an
immediate or quasi-perceptual way.
() The minded/non-minded discrimination condition: Social cognition
must be so construed as to account for our basic distinction between
minded and non-minded entities.
() The world dependency condition: Social cognition must be so con-
strued as to account for the fact that we understand other minds as
constitutively dependent on and in interaction with their physical
and social environment.
() The alterity condition: Social cognition must be so construed as to
account for the fact that we must neither adapt the perspective of
others on the world nor reduce it to our own perspective.
Before turning to each of these four conditions in detail, I’ll describe
Heidegger’s approach in broad strokes, drawing partly on the above
interpretation of existential projection and selfhood and partly on sections
from GA/.
In my account, Dasein is not simply a name for the individual human
being. The self of Dasein does not necessarily refer to the I ‘as this factical
individual’, to ‘the individual I-ness, of my self’ (GA, /).
Selfhood, in Heidegger’s existential sense, does not take selves to be
individual discrete entities. Instead, existential selfhood is a specific type
of reference – the for-the-sake-of – that structures a relational whole of
significance. These self-references ensure that a field of possibilities is
always significant to someone, that they are anchored in a self that cares
about what and how it is in the world, in an entity ‘that in its being has
this very being as an issue’ (SZ, /).
Often the disclosed possibilities are simply significant to me as an
individual. They appear as possibilities that I can choose to realise.
Interestingly, however, Heidegger occasionally suggests that possibilities
can also be disclosed as significant to someone else, to another individual
human agent or group of human agents. SZ thus tells us that ‘[i]n being-
with, as the existential “for-the-sake-of” of others, these have already been
disclosed in their Dasein’ (SZ, /). Elsewhere, he emphasises that
 Forms of Being-With
Dasein is not a term for the individual but a term for existential selfhood
and that ‘self can be said equally of the I and the you: “I-myself”, “you-
yourself”’ (GA, /). For instance, I might understand a hammer as
salient to a carpenter building a fence. While significance requires both in-
order-to’s and for-the-sake-of’s, the for-the-sake-of’s need not point in my
direction, so to speak. Sartre might have something like this in mind when
he describes the appearance of another person in a park as a ‘decentraliza-
tion of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simul-
taneously effecting’, because everything is now also conceived as significant
to the other (Sartre , ).
For Heidegger, personal pronouns like I, you, and he do not mainly refer
to discrete entities. Instead, they are ‘adverbs of Dasein [Daseinsadverbien]’
(GA, /). By this, he means to say that we understand ourselves
and others as different modifications of the same whole of significance, as
different constellations of in-order-to relations and for-the-sake-of rela-
tions. So, when I understand an entity as a he, I do so because I understand
this entity as relating to its environment as significant, that is, as soliciting
responses from the entity in a way that matters to the entity in question. In
this way, interpersonal understanding cannot be a relation between two
distinct entities. It can only take place by virtue of the transcendence of the
shared world in which I and you coexist as different polarisations of a field
of possibilities (cf. Wrathall , ). It is in and through transcendence
that ‘it first becomes possible to distinguish among entities and to decide
who and in what way a “self” is, and what is not a “self”’ (GA, /f ).
In GA/, Heidegger uses the term transposedness or, more dynami-
cally, transpositioning [Versetztheit] for the process in which we come to
understand other minded agents. The term Versetztheit comes from the
verb versetzen, which means to put, transfer, or displace something. It
resonates with the term übersetzen, the German word for translate.
Transpositioning is, for Heidegger, the process through which the world
as a field of possibilities is reconfigured in interpersonal encounters. As
such, transpositioning is not an ontological latecomer compared to a prior
solitary being-in-the-world (as being-for-others is for Sartre according to
whom the ‘other’s existence has the nature of a contingent and irreducible
fact’ [Sartre , ]). Rather, transpositioning enacts or fulfils the
transcendental condition of being-with.
Heidegger describes transpositioning by saying that in it
the other entity is precisely supposed to remain what it is and how it is.
Transposing oneself into this entity means going along with what it is and
with how it is. Such going-along-with [Mitgehen] means immediately
 Interpersonal Understanding 
experiencing how it is with this entity, discovering what it is like to be this
entity with which we are going along in this way. Perhaps in doing so we
may even comprehend the other entity more essentially and more incisively
than that entity manages to do on its own. (GA/, f/)
And a little later:
[I]t consists precisely in we ourselves being precisely ourselves, and only in
this way first bringing about the possibility of ourselves being able to go
along with the other entity while remaining other with respect to it. (GA/
, /f )
Taking these two passages as guidelines, we can now see how Heidegger’s
account satisfies the four conditions.
In terms of the immediacy condition, Heidegger explicitly writes that we
immediately experience how it is with this other entity. This underlines that
phenomenologically speaking inference and simulation or indeed quite
rare. Like the phenomenological sense of empathy, transpositioning is
quasi-perceptual in being as direct and immediate as our perception of
tools. We know from the analysis of tools that it requires no cognitive
operations to go from the perception of the hammer to the perception of
the hammer as something to hammer with. In everyday life, our practical
coping with a hammer is prior to a pure, disinterested perception.
Heidegger claims that the same thing holds for our approach to other
people: We do not start with a flurry of unintelligible bodily movements
and then interpret it as purposeful behaviour. In everyday life, we perceive
the other as a minded creature doing things in the world. Any deliberate
reflection on the other’s behaviour only enters if our immediate under-
standing fails for some reason.
Concerning the minded/non-minded discrimination condition, Heidegger
writes that the other is supposed to remain ‘what it is and how it is’. The
what in this formulation concerns our basic ability to distinguish between
minded and non-minded creatures as is clear from the further discussion in
GA/. Here Heidegger discusses whether and how we can transpose
ourselves into human beings, animals, and non-minded objects like stones.
I will return to the issue of nonhuman animals later and for now, focus on
the basic ability to distinguish between Dasein and inert objects
like stones.
Keeping in mind that Dasein is an entity ‘that in its being has this very
being as an issue’ (SZ, /), it is clear that an entity is disclosed as
Dasein if it is disclosed as relating to its physical and social environment as
something significant to it. Significance is, as we have seen, constituted by
 Forms of Being-With
in-order-to relations and for-the-sake-of relations. I understand an entity as
Dasein if I understand it as relating to its environment as something that
can be used in order to pursue specific ends that are determined by its care
for its own being. The stone, on the other hand, lack this type of self-
reference; it does not polarise its environment into a matrix of salience.
Dasein can integrate the stone into its specific activities by using it as
means to some end, but we do not ordinarily understand entities like the
stone as having the same type of self-reference as us and therefore we do
not understand entities like the stone as relating to its environment in the
same significant way as us. For entities like the stone ‘their being is “a
matter of indifference”; or more precisely, they “are” such that their being
can be neither a matter of indifference to them, nor the opposite’ (SZ, /
). Minded entities are distinct from non-minded entities because we
only disclose the former based on a for-the-sake-of reference (cf. SZ, /
; GA, /f; GA, /, /). Lacking this type of
self-reference, stones offer no sphere of transposability (GA/, f/
). Human beings, in contrast, ‘already find themselves transposed in
their existence into others’ (GA/, /).
Let us turn to the world dependency condition. In transposing ourselves
into an entity, we do not grasp it independently of our shared surround-
ings. Rather, we ‘go along with’ it. ‘Going-along-with’ indicates that
interpersonal understanding discloses the other within a teleologically
and normatively structured context. I do not merely see the other as being
sad, but as being sad because of something. Similarly, I do not merely see
the other who is standing around doing nothing as an inanimate object
but as someone who has zoned out or as someone who is taking a break
(cf. SZ, /). The other is constitutively related to our shared sur-
roundings, which means that I only understand the other if I can pre-
reflectively correlate his behaviour to the world; if I can interpret his
behaviour as responding to a matrix of salience.


In some places, Heidegger qualifies this point by taking various forms of animism into consideration.
In “myth” and “art” certain objects, which are considered non-minded from a “scientific” point of
view, are experienced as animated [beseelt] (GA/, f/). Yet, this merely underlines the
thesis that our experience of what is minded depends on how we ascribe for-the-sake-of references
rather than, say, the physical microstructure of the entities in question (cf. GA, –).

An objection to this claim is that certain expressions are indeed meaningful without this form of
context. One might argue that when I see lowered eyebrows, squeezed eyes, wrinkled nose, raised
upper lip and so on, I simply see pain without correlating this expression with a cause. I agree that it
is important (qua the immediacy condition) to maintain that any correlation or triangulation must
be pre-reflective in nature. However, I am not sure that we would understand pain if we separated it
from the background understanding granted to us by triangulation. In the case of pain, I think it is
particularly important that we triangulate the other’s expression diachronically. Would we recognise
 Interpersonal Understanding 
That such going-along-with is a necessary constituent in interpersonal
understanding resonates with the idea of pre-reflective triangulation. In
interpersonal understanding, I triangulate the behaviour of the other with
the environment and myself. In joint attention, two people comport
themselves thematically towards the same object, while being non-
thematically aware that the other person also comports himself towards
the object in a similar manner. In going-along-with, in contrast, one
person comports himself thematically towards another person, while being
non-thematically aware that this other person comports himself themati-
cally towards some object. So, where joint attention is a triangulating
object-awareness, the going-along-with of interpersonal understanding is
a triangulating other-awareness.
The alterity condition states that transpositioning must maintain a dis-
tinction between self and other. It is clear from the passages cited above
that Heidegger certainly does not intend transposition to reduce the other
to the self or the self to the other: ‘[T]he other entity is precisely supposed
to remain what it is and how it is, while we ourselves “[remain] other with
respect to it” (GA/, f/f ). Yet, Levinas, to take just one example,
has famously objected that the alterity of the other must be conceived as an
“opening up which is not being-in-the-world”’ (Levinas , , my
italics). How do we satisfy the alterity condition if our understanding of
ourselves and our understanding of the other are both drawn from the
same medium?
The solution to this problem draws, once again, on the idea of inter-
personal understanding as a pre-reflective triangulation. When one person
transposes himself into another person, he does not adopt the perspective
of the other. Rather, he correlates the other’s behaviour with the world
seen from his own perspective, thereby also slightly altering his own
perspective on the world. Remembering that perspective, in this context,
means practical involvement, we can say that transpositioning succeeds if
the person gets a good interpretative fit between the other’s behaviour and
the world understood as a matrix of salience. The other remains what and
how the other is – a Dasein engaged in existential projections – once we see

a facial expression as pain if we did not tacitly assume it to be preceded by a specific stimulus (the
cause of the pain) and be followed by another type of reaction (expressions of relief )? Would we
recognise said facial expressions as pain if it occurred entirely at random and if it was not followed
by relief but a random emotion ranging from hysterical laughter to complete indifference? Of
course, we might see it as something akin to pain (let us call it pain*), but it seems to me that the
intelligibility of pain* is parasitic on our usual triangulating understanding of pain.

For a discussion of Heidegger’s conception of alterity, see McMullin (, Chapter ).
 Forms of Being-With
the other not as, say, an occurrent entity or a self-enclosed transcendental
subject but as a polarisation of the field of possibilities that we ourselves
also polarise.
In this account, the distinction between self and other is neither the
absolute difference between two transcendental subjects nor the absolute
distance between the worldly self and an other-worldly other. The difference
between self and other is the difference between two involved perspectives in a field
of possibilities, two polarisations of the same matrix of salience. Accordingly,
interpersonal understanding does not require that we abandon our perspec-
tive nor that two perspectives merge. Transpositioning opens a single struc-
ture of possibilities in which these perspectives are related but separate. In
understanding another person, certain possibilities light up as salient (for me,
for the other, or for us), while others are dimmed down. World understanding
is ‘eo ipso an understanding of one another’ (GA, /).
Of course, we do not always get a good fit between the matrix of salience
and the other’s behaviour. These cases call for ‘the special hermeneutics of
empathy’. Here ‘empathy’ refers to a kind of cognitively demanding social
cognition in which we through conscious and deliberate mental operations try
to make sense of and predict the behaviour of the other. As Heidegger points
out, it is a ‘substitute’ of the fluid and dynamic social cognition of transpo-
sitioning (SZ, /). If we, for example, continuously expect the other to
respond to certain solicitations in our shared environment that he or she
completely ignores, then we might utilise folk-psychological theories or
deliberate simulations to improve our understanding of the other. But this
only shows us that the special hermeneutics of empathy presupposes the basic
understanding of the other as a minded world-enmeshed agent provided in
transpositioning. Empathy in this sense enters the scene when the fluid
transpositioning breaks down. What is more, it seems that transpositioning
is not only the presupposition but also the aim of theorising and simulation
insofar as theorising and simulation arguably must feed back into transposi-
tioning to count as a way of understanding other people. After all, we would
not normally say that we ‘understood someone’ if we constantly needed a
series of explicit cognitive operations to interact with them with just a
modicum of success. In this sense, other people are more like tools than
mathematical puzzles. We usually understand them without further ado.

. Interlude on the Ethics of Solicitude

SZ’s description of solicitude seems to give an ethical spin to transposi-
tioning by distinguishing leaping-in from leaping-ahead.
 Interpersonal Understanding 
[Leaping-in] takes over for the other that with which he is to concern
himself. The other is thus thrown out of his own position; he steps back
so that afterwards, when the matter has been attended to, he can either take
it over as something finished and at his disposal, or disburden himself of it
completely. In such solicitude the other can become one who is dominated
and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden
from him. This kind of solicitude, which leaps in and takes away ‘care,’ is to
a large extent determinative for being with one another, and pertains for the
most part to our concern with the available.
In contrast to this, there is also the possibility of a kind of solicitude which
does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of him in his existentiell
potentiality-for-being, not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give
it back to him authentically as such for the first time. This kind of solicitude
pertains essentially to authentic care – that is, to the existence of the other,
not to a ‘what’ with which he is concerned; it helps the other to become
transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it. (SZ, /f )
Some commentators take these cursory remarks to suggest that some
inauthentic forms of solicitude disclose other people as objects and that
authentic solicitude, in contrast, appropriately recognise other people as
fellow Dasein thus sensing in Heidegger an ontologically inflated version
of Kant’s distinction between treating others as mere means and treating
others as ends in themselves. Mahon O’Brien writes, for example, that to
leap-in is to ‘usurp someone else’s horizon and keep them locked within an
existence characterised as continuous presence’, while to leap-ahead of
someone is to see them ‘as similarly claimed and thus bounded by an
horizon of finitude in their own right, thus freeing the other for their own
being-toward-death and recognising in the other the same latent tempo-
rality which is constitutive of my own capacity to exist interpretively’
(O’Brien , ). On this reading, authentic intersubjectivity is ‘based
on a reciprocal recognition of two people’s mutual finitude’ (O’Brien
, ). Yet, this cannot be right. If I were to disclose another entity
as ‘locked within an existence characterized as continuous presence’ rather
than as ‘bounded by an horizon of finitude’ and ‘latent temporality’,
I simply would not recognise this entity as another Dasein. Inauthentic
intersubjectivity, so construed, would not satisfy the minded/non-minded
discrimination condition.
I thus agree with McMullin, when she argues that all forms of solicitude
involve a ‘minimal level of Dasein-acknowledgment’ (McMullin ,


See Sherover (), Vogel (), Young (), and, more recently, O’Brien (), Sikka
(), and Reid ().
 Forms of Being-With
). ‘[T]he acknowledgement of the other Dasein’s status as fundamen-
tally distinct from a thing’, she writes, ‘lie[s] deeper than authentic/
inauthentic ways of being in the world’ (McMullin , ).
Since transpositioning is not itself an ethical phenomenon, I think there
is good reason to doubt that the distinction between leaping-in and
leaping-ahead is an ethical distinction. Rather, I take it to be an attempt
to show that very different forms of intersubjectivity can be accommodated
within Heidegger’s framework. In my reading, leaping-in and leaping-
ahead are two extreme ways of caring for the others’ for-the-sake-of
references as these are disclosed in transpositioning.
We can see that the distinction is not an ethical distinction by the fact
that it does not align with what we with Nagel might call ‘the possibility of
altruism’ (Nagel ). Someone can, for instance, leap in for someone else
with the very best of intentions. For example, imagine a father to a nearly
grown child. This father correctly recognises the needs, wants, and interests
of his child. Altruistically, he then takes it upon himself to satisfy these needs
and wants and to stimulate all the child’s interests. In this case, the father
transposes himself into the child: he recognises the child as an existential self
and – let us assume – has a good grasp of what matters to the child. As
Heidegger noted above, he might even understand the child better than the
child understands itself (GA/, f/). Yet, by taking over the child’s
concerns and thus micromanaging the life of the child, the father leaps in for
the child. Expressed in everyday language, the nearly grown child may,
rightfully, accuse the parent of being patronising even if he is altruistic.
Regarding leaping-ahead, let’s adopt an example from the animated sci-fi
TV-show Rick and Morty. In the show, there is an invention called a Meeseeks
Box. Whenever you press a button on the Meeseeks Box, it spawns a blue
humanoid called a Mr. Meeseeks that will live until it has completed the first
order given to it. In one of the episodes, Beth, a mother and wife, presses the
button and asks Mr. Meeseeks to help her become ‘a more complete woman’.
Mr. Meeseeks takes Beth on a date and encourages her to focus more on
herself and, in effect, to liberate herself from the expectations of her family.
Beth realises that she should leave her husband and leans in to kiss Mr.
Meeseeks, which disappears after having completed its task.
For the sake of the argument, we will assume that Mr. Meeseeks is
sufficiently similar to human beings to qualify as Dasein; we see that
Mr. Meeseeks could only help Beth become a more complete woman by


This is not quite the case in Rick and Morty since Mr. Meeseeks has no choice but to complete his
order, whereas Dasein understands possibilities as possibilities.
 Interpersonal Understanding 
transposing itself into her. Mr. Meeseeks arguably tries to give Beth back
her potentiality-for-being by encouraging her to assume responsibility for
her life. In this sense, Mr. Meeseeks leaps ahead of Beth and, yet, it seems
that no element in this example qualifies as altruistic. Beth, on her part,
decides to focus on herself, probably to the dismay of her family. And, as
the TV-show explains, Mr. Meeseeks does not help Beth for her own sake
but only because existence is painful for Mr. Meeseeks.
This shows that transpositioning and solicitude are by themselves
ethically neutral even if they are presupposed by altruistic concerns for
others. This is not to say that no normative lessons can be learned from
Heidegger. In Chapter , I argue that his account of authenticity involves a
kind of normativity that, although it is distinct from moral normativity,
does indeed affect our relations to other people.

. The Problem of Nonhuman Animals

Let us now turn to the question of nonhuman animals. Which status do
they have in Heidegger’s ontology? Can we transpose ourselves into them?
Heidegger discusses this issue at length in GA/, yet, his answer is
notoriously ambivalent. Thinking of a dog, he says:
[D]oes it comport itself toward the table as table, toward the stairs as stairs?
All the same, it does go up the stairs with us. It feeds with us – and yet, we
do not really ‘feed.’ It eats with us – and yet, it does not really ‘eat.’
Nevertheless, it is with us! A going along with . . ., a transposedness, and
yet not. (GA/, /)
In a word, the animal ‘grants the possibility of transposedness’, even
though it ‘necessarily refuses any going along with’ (GA/, /).
Why is Heidegger so ambivalent when it comes to nonhuman animals?
Considering the preceding discussion of transpositioning, I believe we can
discern an answer that will, ultimately, also shed further light on the
structure of interpersonal understanding between Dasein.
In my terms, Heidegger’s overall argument is this: Different forms of
intentionality are made possible by different ontological structures.
Animals have different forms of intentionality than human beings; they
‘behave’ or ‘are captivated,’ while human beings comport themselves. For
this reason, animals must have a different ontological structure than the


For an attempt to develop an ethical theory by combining a Heidegger-inspired account of social
cognition with a philosophical anthropology based on altruism, see Løgstrup ().
 Forms of Being-With
being-in-the-world of human beings. Being-in-the-world is a distinctive
ontological holism that relates human beings to the objective and social
environment in a particular way. Assuming that animals are also holisti-
cally constituted, the difference must lie in the way the animal, vis-à-vis the
human, relates to its objective and social environment. In transposing
oneself into an entity one relates this entity to its environment in accor-
dance with the type of being of the entity in question. Given that the
animal relates to its environment differently than humans do, it must also
be different to transpose oneself into an animal than into a human being.
Before turning to the details of his analysis, we should note that
Heidegger’s argument is ambiguous. He clearly juxtaposes the human
being and the animal in a way that resonates with Western humanism
and anthropocentrism, but what exactly does animality mean in this
context? On the one hand, Heidegger defines animality in a commonsen-
sical extensional way. The thesis that animals are world-poor ‘does not tell
us something merely about insects or merely about mammals, since it also
includes, for example, non-articulated creatures, unicellular animals like
amoebae, infusoria, sea urchins and the like – all animals, every animal’
(GA/, /). The discussion of world-poverty concerns all ani-
mals – except the human being. Heidegger has rightly been criticised for
operating with such an unconvincingly crude conception of animality.
As Derrida says, it suggests
that there is one thing, one domain, one homogeneous type of entity,
which is called animality in general, for which any example would do the
job. This is a thesis which . . . remains fundamentally teleological
and traditional. (Derrida , )
But in more careful passages, Heidegger says that his analysis is speculative,
that his thesis ‘goes too far’ (GA/, /), and that his characteri-
sation of animality is not ‘drawn from animality itself’ but conceived in
‘comparison with the human being’ (GA/, /). At one point
Heidegger even seems to admit that we are right to be suspicious of the
idea that animals can be taken as one uniform group since some animals
display a type of intentionality that corresponds closely with our own while
others are indeed very distant (GA/, /). If this is indeed the
case, Heidegger’s analysis of animality hardly holds for all animals. As
Carman notes, Heidegger’s use of the term ‘animal’ is ‘deliberately vague,
since the point is to specify an ontological distinction between the world-


For an overview, see Cykowski ().
 Interpersonal Understanding 
[building] and the world-poor, not to speculate about where the division
occurs biologically among species’ (Carman , n). In this reading,
we should first and foremost understand the concept of animality inten-
sionally. The concept refers, by definition, to those entities that are ‘world-
poor,’ while the exact extension of the term is debatable.
To be sure, Heidegger assumes ‘animality’ to be fixed both extensionally
and intensionally but when pressed I believe he would argue that the
intensional definition is primary. Since Heidegger’s explicit aim is not
ethological but to clarify human being-in-the-world through a conceptual
contrast, we should, following the principle of charity, take the concept of
animality to be defined intensionally. Animality refers primarily to those
entities that are world-poor; any specification of the term’s extension must
be provisional. Following this advice, I will first clarify how Heidegger
understands the ontological holism of world-poverty, and then I will
compare this to the holism of human beings and clarify what it entails
for our possibility of transposing ourselves into world-poor entities, which
I, for stylistic reasons, call simply animals. In this reading, Heidegger’s
frequent examples are mere illustrations of world-poverty rather than actual
empirical evidence. This is not to say, however, that we should completely
disregard the question of extension, and I will return to it towards the end
of the section.
Following the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, Heidegger emphasises that
the animal, whatever its differences to the human being, has a surrounding
world [Umwelt]. A lizard, he says, does not exist like an occurrent thing,
simply lying indifferently next to things like a rock lying indifferently next
to a tree. It ‘has its own relation to the rock, to the sun, and to a host of
other things’ (GA/, /). Yet, according to Heidegger, the lizard
does not relate to the rock as a rock.
One is tempted to suggest that what we identify as the rock and the sun are
just lizard-things for the lizard, so to speak. When we say that the lizard is
lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word ‘rock’ in order to indicate
that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the
lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard as a rock. If we cross out the word
we do not simply mean to imply that something else is in question here or is
taken as something else. Rather we imply that whatever it is not accessible


This, at least, is how I read his claim that the thesis on world-poverty is a statement of essence
[Wesensaussage] but not “simply because it holds true for all animals and not merely for some of
them. Rather, it is the other way around: it holds true for all animals because it is a statement of
essence. Universal validity can only result from our knowledge insofar as it is essential in each case,
and not the other way around” (GA/, /).
 Forms of Being-With
to it as an entity. . . . Every animal as animal has determinate set of relations
to its sources of nourishment, its prey, its enemies, its sexual mates, and
so on. (GA/, f/)
Here Heidegger grants that animals certainly have a form of intentionality.
Things are ‘given in some way for the lizard’. Furthermore, like human
beings, animals operate within a relational whole that determines how they
experience things. For the animal, this whole consists of relations to
nourishment, prey, enemies, and so on.
Heidegger calls the relational whole surrounding the animal a ‘disinhibi-
tion ring’ suggesting that the drives and capabilities of the animal entirely
determine which and how entities appear within this sphere (GA/, /
). ‘Since capability for . . . thoroughly governs the animal’s type of being,
an entity such as the animal, when it comes into relation with something else,
can only encounter something that “affects” [angeht] or initiates [an-lässt] the
capability. Nothing else can ever penetrate the ring around the animal’ (GA/
, /). Animals are also individuated holistically. They are not simply
biological specimens. Rather, they are essentially bound to or captivated by
their disinhibition ring in such a way that the animal body itself is only
meaningful as long as we conceive of it as grounded in – as an organ within –
‘the unity of captivation’ [Einheit der Benommenheit] that allows an environ-
ment to display itself for the animal (GA/, /). Yet, how animals
relate to their environment is fully determined by their instincts and capac-
ities. ‘Throughout its life, the animal is confined to its environmental world,
immured as it were within a barrel that is incapable of further expansion or
contraction’ (GA/, /). The world of the animal thus appears to be
a fixed sphere that in advance determines how things appear to it.
Let us compare this with the holism of human being-in-the-world.
Above we saw that human beings also encounter entities based on a
relational whole. I argued that this holism constitutively depends on
environmental objects in such a way that real-world entities constrain
our existential projections and that it constitutively depends on social
relations since our manner of encountering entities is necessarily respon-
sive to the behaviour of others. The juncture of object externalism and
social externalism is that even though we always encounter a as b depend-
ing on our specific existential projections, we are also aware that the entity
a can be disclosed differently. Entities are free for ‘mutual use’; they are
what relates and separates us at the same time.
The crux of Heidegger’s analysis is that animals are world-poor because
they do not have access to entities as entities. This claim follows from the
idea that the animal is fixed or captivated within its disinhibition ring in
 Interpersonal Understanding 
the following way: If the animal is captivated within its disinhibition ring,
it can only experience entities as correlates of its drives and capabilities, as
pure affects. If this is the case, animals do not take entities to exist
independently of themselves, and, therefore, they lack the possibility of
properly revising or modifying their understanding of entities in light of
the behavioural evidence afforded to them in encounters with other
creatures. Animals are object internalists in the sense that they cannot
successfully refer to or intend an object as anything but an affect
interior to its own realm of manifestation, its own disinhibition ring.
Correspondingly, in terms of social externalism, this means that the animal
cannot intend an object with someone who does not share its disinhibition
ring to some degree. ‘[T]he encircling rings are not comparable amongst
themselves at all, and in each case the totality of the manifest, dovetailing
encircling rings are not simply part of the entities that are otherwise
manifest to us, rather they hold us captive in quite specific ways’
(GA/, /).
This means, further, that animals lack the a as b-structure characteristic
of Dasein. As we saw above, the a as b-structure requires that we possess an
awareness that our intended objects are independent of and therefore not
exhausted by our particular understanding of them. This enables us to
successfully intend or refer to objects even with someone who does not
share our understanding of being. We, hence, understand entities as
enmeshed in a dynamic structure of possibility that is responsive to the
behaviour of those we encounter. Now, in the case of human–human
interaction, this responsiveness is mutual. However, given that animals do
not perceive entities as entities but simply as affects, they cannot modify
their understanding of entities in response to the behaviour of other
creatures like ourselves to the extent that we can. The relational whole
that guides the intentionality of animals is fixed or static, meaning that
they only have a determinate set of relations through which they can make
sense of their surroundings. If an entity does not seem to fit one sort of
relation (e.g., being-mate), the animal must try another relation
(e.g., being-prey or being-predator) within its fixed set of relations to
secure a good interpretative fit between its environmental matrix of
salience and the other’s behaviour. If it fails to achieve a good fit, it cannot
make sense of the entity.
In contrast, ‘the world of man is rich’, Heidegger says,
greater in range [Umfang], far more penetrating [Eindringlichkeit], con-
stantly extendable not only in range (we can always bring more and more
entities into consideration) but also in respect to the manner in which we
 Forms of Being-With
can penetrate [durchdringen] ever more deeply into this penetrability
[Eindringlichkeit]. Consequently, we can characterise the relation man
possesses to the world by referring to the multiplication [Vermehrbarkeit]
of that which the human relates to. Therefore, we speak of [the human as]
world-building. (GA/, /)
Whereas the animal is captivated or bound by its way of seeing, human
beings can expand their field of appearing and penetrate deeper into it by
getting a better and more nuanced understanding of the entities that they
encounter. This does not mean, of course, that the human being is
suddenly a limitless, other-worldly reason, but simply that the horizon of
being-in-the-world is open-ended. The relational whole of Dasein is
dynamic insofar as the whole of relations that constitute it can be made
to accommodate various types of behaviour in a way that is not reducible
to a set of presupposed interpretative types. We can express this open-
endedness that characterise human understanding by borrowing an image
from ‘Letter on Humanism’ – human understanding ‘walks the boundary
of the boundless’ (GA, /). It is finite and open-ended at the
same time.
The fact that we comport ourselves to entities as entities, that we intend
real-world objects in a way that is responsive to the behaviour of others,
marks the ontological difference between human being and animal.
According to Heidegger, humans can, in contrast to animals, extend and
nuance their understanding of being by virtue of transpositioning or
triangulation.
What does this entail for the possibility of interspecies understanding?
Heidegger insists that we can indeed transpose ourselves into animals in
much, although not exactly, the same way as we do with other human
beings. ‘Human Dasein is intrinsically a peculiar transposedness into the
encompassing contextual ring of living entities’ (GA/, /). We
can ‘[go] along with the animal in the way in which it sees and hears, how
it seizes its prey or evades its predators, how it builds its nest and so forth’
(GA/, /). Human beings triangulate the world with animals. In
a sense, this point is quite obvious, for if we did not, we would not have
pets, and we would certainly have fared poorly in evolutionary history.
There is little reason to believe that this type of transpositioning is
radically different from our transpositioning into humans. It seems to me
that Dasein-animal social cognition must satisfy the same four conditions
mentioned above: () To some extent, we presumably understand animals
immediately without conscious inferences or deliberate simulations; () we
have a basic awareness of the animal as minded rather than non-minded;
 Interpersonal Understanding 
() we understand animals by relating them to their environment; and ()
we do so without abandoning the self/other-distinction.
While we can, in principle, understand the animal by transposing
ourselves into its disinhibition ring, the crucial difference to Dasein–
Dasein interaction is that when we transpose ourselves into animals we
do not expect animals to transpose themselves into us. Due to their
captivation by disinhibition rings, animals cannot triangulate the world
with us – or they can only do so in a fixed, static, and deficient way – even
if we can triangulate the world with them. For social cognition amongst
human beings, we must then add a fifth requirement, namely,
() The mutuality condition: Social cognition among human beings must
be so construed as to account for the fact that others can understand
us in the same way that we understand them.
Lacking the capacity to intend entities as entities, the animal cannot
triangulate the world in response to our behaviour; they cannot engage
in such a fusion of horizons, to borrow a phrase from Gadamer. Therefore,
the animal ‘grants the possibility of transposedness’, and yet ‘necessarily
refuses any going along with’ (GA/, /) in the proper sense of
intending an entity with someone who has a different understanding of
being. More specifically, we might share the world with the animal in the
sense that () we comport ourselves in accordance with a whole of
significance that is responsive to the behaviour of the animal, that is, that
adjusts to the lens through which we take the animal to see the world, and
() we tacitly assume the animal to respond to the same entities that we do.
The world sharing is asymmetrical, however, since () the animal’s disin-
hibition ring is fixed and unresponsive to our behaviour and () the
animal, which might tacitly assume us to respond to the same drive-
triggers as it does, does not assume us to intend the same entities, since
to intend something as an entity is to understand the entity as something
that can be disclosed in multiple ways.
Now, is this account of interspecies understanding plausible? One might
object that our relations to real animals – like real-life dogs and chimpan-
zees – are far richer and more complicated than Heidegger would have us
believe. People train their dogs, so the objection goes, and thereby enrich
their world. It is undeniable that dogs can ‘read’ their owners or trainers in
the sense that they take their expressions and actions to be correlated with
the environment. Imagine, for instance, a dog that senses the fear of its
owner and starts barking at an intruder. This obviously involves a kind
of triangulation.
 Forms of Being-With
At this point, Heidegger would insist that his point is not that there is
no triangulation between humans and animals whatsoever, but, rather,
that this triangulation is marred by a fundamental asymmetry. On
Heidegger’s analysis, the asymmetry consists in the fact that human beings
have the possibility of transposing themselves into the animals – that is, the
possibility of understanding the environment with reference to the set of
relations that constitute the drives and capacities of that particular animal –
while the animal is completely locked up within its own horizon. This does
not by itself render something like training unintelligible since it might
still be possible to modify when the different drives are triggered as well as
the sequence in which they are triggered. To train a dog to fetch would, on
this account, be to develop a game that involved hunting as well as the
sharing of prey with the pack. Or, more precisely, this would be a game for
the human trainer, while it is unclear to which extent it could be a game
for the dog since animals, on Heidegger’s reductive account, lack the
capacity to pretend. For them, objects simply are drive-triggering affects
such as ‘prey’ or ‘enemy’.
The critic might try to counter this by saying that the ability to
‘transpose’ oneself into other species must come in degrees and that
Heidegger fails to accommodate this. Is the difference between human
Dasein and animal really ‘abysmal’, as Heidegger says? However, if I am
right that Heidegger’s conception of animality is defined intensionally, he
is self-evidently right that the difference cannot be one of degrees, because
the term ‘animal’ is defined in such a way that it necessarily contrasts with
the concept of human Dasein. As I argued above, we should not read the
analysis as a reflection on real animals, but a reflection on what it is (or
what it might be) to be world-poor, that is, to be conscious but to lack the
a as b-structure. Defined this way, there is an essential and insurmountable
difference between human Dasein and animal.
This clearly lets Heidegger off the hook too easily. We cannot disregard
the question of extension completely, and despite moments of hesitation,
Heidegger does claim that his concept of animality extends to all (nonhu-
man) animals. Does the continuum established through natural selection
allow an abysmal difference between human and nonhuman? The question
of extension is an empirical question, and Heidegger could very well be
wrong in claiming that certain real species are world-poor. We can thus
easily imagine that some yet-to-be-discovered breed of alien or higher
primate would satisfy the mutuality condition. We would then – perhaps
after a transitional period where we grew accustomed to seeing them as co-
intenders and co-actors rather than nonhuman puzzles – see these aliens or
 Interpersonal Understanding 
primates as fellow Dasein with whom we could triangulate our environ-
ment symmetrically.
Michael Tomasello’s empirically informed comparison between human
thinking and the cognitive abilities of other animals and other great apes in
particular is, however, more or less congruent with Heidegger’s analysis.
Difference species have different ways of life, of course, which means that
they perceive or attend to different situations (and components of situa-
tions). Thus, for a leopard, the situation of bananas in a tree would not
represent an opportunity to eat, but the presence of a chimpanzee would.
For the chimpanzee, in contrast, the leopard’s presence now presents an
obstacle to its value of avoiding predators, and so it should look for a
situation providing opportunities for escape, such as a tree to climb without
low-hanging limbs – given its knowledge that leopards cannot climb such
trees and its familiarity with its own tree-climbing prowess. If we now
throw into the mix a worm resting on the banana’s surface, the relevant
situations for the three different species – the obstacles and opportunities
for their respective goals – would overlap even less, if at all. Relevant
situations are thus determined jointly by the organism’s goals and values,
its perceptual abilities and knowledge, and its behavioural capacities, that is
to say, by its overall functioning as a self-regulating system. (Tomasello
, f )
For Tomasello, nonhuman animals are ‘self-regulating systems’, and these
systems are pigeonholed, as it were, within specific interpretations of their
environment in a way that is completely determined by the goals and
values of the organism in question. In contrast, ‘only humans can concep-
tualize one and the same situation or entity under differing, even conflict-
ing, social perspectives (leading ultimately to a sense of “objectivity”)’,
which also means that only humans can participate in complex forms of
shared intentionality through which joint goals are formed and joint
actions initiated (Tomasello , ).
Whether the leopard, the chimpanzee, and the worm are aptly described
by the intensionally fixed concept of animality is an empirical question. As
such, it lies beyond the scope of Heidegger’s project. As we recall, his
ambition in GA/ is to clarify what it is for Dasein to have a world
through an admittedly speculative comparison.


Perhaps some of us already see our animal companions in this way. Once the question of extension
is bracketed, there is nothing in Heidegger’s account to rule out this possibility. Indeed, as we saw
in footnote , he believes that his conception of existential selfhood can explain the phenomenon of
anthropomorphism (or, better, Daseinmorphism). This might be another reason that his remarks
on real animals such as dogs are so ambiguous.
  

Shared Action

Human beings often act together. They dance, paint houses, and go for
walks together. It is widely recognised that shared actions such as these are
not simply aggregates of individual actions. Rather, if two or more people
are to act together, their actions and intentions must interrelate, so that
each person’s actions constitutively depend on the other people’s actions.
This interdependence must be immediately obvious to the co-agents so
that they are each aware that they act together rather than individually.
The general capacity for individuals to ‘team up’ is discussed under the
term collective intentionality. In this chapter, I will develop a Heideggerian
account of one type of collective intentionality, namely, our capacity to act
together. I will thus use the term ‘shared action’ to refer to any intentional
activity that constitutively depends on several people being co-actors in a
way that is immediately obvious to them.
It is widely acknowledged that our capacity for shared action is a key
element in understanding the human condition. As we have just seen,
Tomasello suggests that it is the central feature that separates human
beings from the rest of the animal kingdom. Yet, it is conceptually unclear
what exactly shared action is and how it differs from individual action.
One of the reasons for this incertitude is, or so I shall argue, that the
dominant approaches to shared action and intentions (Bratman ,
; Gilbert , ; Searle , ) presuppose an overly
intellectualist model of action that is largely at odds with the phenome-
nology of action, i.e., with how minded agents typically understand
themselves and what they do in everyday activities. Given that shared
action requires that we are aware that we act together, we must get the


As I use the term, ‘shared action’ refers to any intentional activity in which we are immediately aware
that it constitutively depends on other people. Construed this way, ‘shared action’ is an umbrella
term that covers several distinct forms of action with different degrees and types of intersubjective
cooperation. ‘Joint action’ is the subtype of shared action with the highest degree of cooperation,
namely, jointly coordinated and jointly committed action (cf. Section .).


 Shared Action 
phenomenology right. Recently, some work has been put forth that aims
to correct the intellectualism of the dominant approaches (e.g., Schmid
a, b, ; Zahavi a, b, , ), but I will argue
that these approaches do not go far enough in their phenomenological
reinterpretations of shared agency. Instead, I will draw upon the model of
agency found in Heidegger and other phenomenologists like Merleau-
Ponty and Dreyfus to spell out the phenomenological structure of shared
action. I argue that a specific form of agency – what I call pre-reflective
agency – is best explained as the way in which an environment solicits us
to act. Recall, as I use the terms, solicitations differ from affordances
insofar as affordances can be inert. Solicitations, in contrast, are affor-
dances that prompt actions because the relevant agent is committed to
some underlying project that is furthered through these affordances.
Extending this line of thought, I will argue that some solicitations prompt
shared action. They do so because they solicit several agents to cooperate
(i.e., to act on shared affordances) or because they solicit an agent or several
agents to act to further a joint project (i.e., to act due to a joint
commitment).
In line with the contemporary debate on collective intentionality, this
chapter focuses on small-scale, egalitarian, and temporary group forma-
tions. In contrast, most (but not all) of Heidegger’s explicit reflections on
the we appear in the ‘s in the politically charged context of his discussion
of the national identity of the Germans and, hence, target a very different
we, namely, a large-scale, hierarchical, and prolonged group formation.
I discuss large-scale we’s in Chapters  and .
I proceed in the following way: First, I outline some of the problems
characteristic of contemporary approaches to shared action (Section .).
I then suggest that these problems can be avoided if we construct our
model of shared action on the account of pre-reflective action found in
existential phenomenology rather than the standard account of reflective
action. Since, however, the phenomenology of action is typically formu-
lated in individualistic terms, I combine it with the idea of plural pre-
reflective self-awareness to show how solicitations can be given to a group
rather than an individual (Section .). I proceed to analyse solicitations in
terms of (a) affordances inflected by someone’s abilities and dispositions
and (b) someone’s self-referential commitment to a project furthered by
these affordances (or, in short, in terms of (a) goals and (b) commitments)
(Section .). Drawing on this analysis, I construct a phenomenologically
plausible taxonomy of individual and shared actions that incorporate both
teleological and normative elements of shared actions (Section .). In
 Forms of Being-With
response to the question of which process enables individuals to share
solicitations, I show that what Heidegger calls discourse [Rede] is the
expressive process in which saliences are shared between people (Section
.). I conclude by offering a few reflections on how this interpretation of
the small-scale we compares to the large-scale we’s of social norms and of
nations, which will occupy us in the following two chapters.

. An Outline of Shared Action

I take it that a successful account of shared action must satisfy the
following three conditions:
(a) The plurality condition: Shared action requires multiple ontologically
similar agents.
(b) The coalescence condition: Shared action requires that the plurality of
agents form a collective.
(c) The awareness condition: Shared action requires that the involved
agents are aware of what they are doing.
These conditions provide a good starting point because if we leave out one
of the conditions, we contradict our basic intuition of what shared action
is. The combination of plurality and awareness without coalescence
wrongfully takes aggregated individual intentions, for example, a group
of people sitting on the bus minding their own business to be a form of
shared action. If we combine plurality and coalescence without the aware-
ness condition, we wrongfully come to include many other activities than
just actions. For instance, we might have a plurality of agents who have
formed a collective (say, a book club), yet only some of their activity will
count as shared action. It might be true for all members of the book club
that they inadvertently shake their legs under the table, but this activity
does not count as a shared action, since the agent or agents must be aware
of what they are doing in a specific way in order for it to count as an

A similar idea can be found in Searle (, ) and is formulated as a list of desiderata in
Mathieson () and Walsh (). Some scholars assume that the coalescence condition and the
awareness condition only obtain when there is common knowledge (or mutual belief ) between the
agents, but as Kirk Ludwig has argued this is too demanding since one can arguably engage in shared
action with others even if one does not know or believe that others will do their part but for instance
simply hopes that they will (, –). I do not think that we can do away with these
conditions, but I agree that the approaches criticised by Ludwig are too demanding. In the following,
I will argue in favour of a non-intellectualist way of reconciling the coalescence condition and the
awareness condition by appealing to the way in which some forms of pre-reflective action tacitly
assumes that others will do their part.
 Shared Action 
action. Lastly, the coalescence condition and the awareness condition
without the plurality condition lead to something like a hive mind,
i.e., several discrete bodies linked together in a single consciousness.
Since aggregated individual intentions fail to fulfil the coalescence
condition, and since the awareness condition requires that we locate
whatever glue makes our individual actions coalesce into a single shared
action immanently in the minds of the co-agents, it seems that any account
of shared action must show that the intentions of the co-agents are
somehow interdependent. What constitutes this interdependence?
Let us take a closer look at two of the most influential accounts, Michael
Bratman’s and Margaret Gilbert’s. Bratman proposes that this interdepen-
dence requires you and me to intend that we J together and that we are
mutually responsive to each other by tracking each other’s intentions and
actions (cf. , –). More specifically, Bratman argues that we
intend J if and only if
() (a) I intend that we J and (b) you intend that we J
() I intend that we J in accordance with and because of ()(a), ()(b),
and meshing subplans of ()(a) and ()(b); you intend that we J in
accordance with and because of ()(a), ()(b) and meshing subplans
of ()(a) and ()(b)
() () and () are common knowledge between us. (, )
This account is ‘reductive in spirit’ (, ), because it reduces shared
actions and intentions to interdependent individual actions and intentions.
These are interdependent because each agent has the collective intention as
its object while being responsive to the other agent and while operating
under conditions of common knowledge.
Margaret Gilbert argues against this reductionism that the coalescence
condition can only be satisfied by a plural subject. A plural subject comes
about when two or more people express their readiness to undertake a joint
commitment, for example, go for a walk (). This commits the
individuals ‘to emulate as best they can a single body’ espousing a goal
(Gilbert , ). The gist of Gilbert’s argument is that once the relevant
individuals express their readiness to form a plural subject and this is
common knowledge between them, they each have a reason to behave in
a specific way. Whereas Bratman takes a joint goal to suffice, Gilbert
stresses that individuals only coalesce, when they are tied together norma-
tively. Recalling that they expressed their readiness to undertake the joint
commitment (through, for instance, an explicit agreement), each member
of the plural subject is entitled to rebuke others if they violate the joint
 Forms of Being-With
commitment. In contrast, to personal commitments, these commitments
cannot be rescinded unilaterally. For instance, in walking together, each
participant can blame the other for walking too fast, for not showing up on
time, and so on.
At the face of it, these accounts are quite different as they locate the
coalescence in different elements of the intention; Bratman focuses on the
intentional object, while Gilbert focuses on the intentional subject. In
addition, they disagree on whether shared action is teleological
(Bratman) or essentially normative (Gilbert). However, their accounts also
have certain similarities by virtue of which, I contend, they both face three
similar problems.
The first problem, which I’ll call the genetic problem, concerns the
transition from individual intentions to collective intentions. In
Bratman’s case, the individual intentions of ()(a) and ()(b) have we
J as their intentional object but this means that the individuals already
possess an understanding of what they can do collectively prior to estab-
lishing the interdependence (–) that supposedly makes shared intentions
possible (cf. Petersson ). Gilbert, on her part, grounds collective
intentionality in joint commitments and argues that joint commitments
are generated when individuals communicate their readiness to undertake
such a commitment. Some argue that communication is itself an instance
of collective intentionality, and if this is the case, Gilbert’s account leads to
an infinite regress, where a joint commitment presupposes communica-
tion, which, in turn, presupposes a joint commitment and so forth
(cf. Schmid ; Schweikard and Schmid ). Thus, the transition
from individual intentions to collective intentions constitutes a problem
for both Bratman and Gilbert.


In a reply to Petersson, Bratman argues that his account avoids the threat of circularity since (),
which is supposed to explain what shared intentionality is, does not have an instance of shared
intentionality as its object. Instead, Bratman argues that ‘we J’ in () refers to a joint activity that is
‘neutral with respect to shared intentionality’ (, ). If I understand it correctly, the suggestion
is that conditions ()–() explain what it is for us to reflectively endorse and undertake some joint
activity. For Bratman, to have an intention to do something is to plan to do it in the sense of settling
on a goal and deliberating on the means to achieve it (, ). In other words, there is no
circularity in saying that we intend J only if you and I each intend that we J, since the instance of ‘we
intend J’ that appears in the analysandum refers to us having reflectively endorsed and undertaken
(i.e., us having planned to) J, while the ‘we J’ that appears in the analysans refers to a joint activity
without this reflective endorsement. Formulated in this way, Bratman clearly presupposes that we are
already aware of possible joint activities prior to forming a full-blown shared plan. In emphasising
pre-reflective rather than reflective action (see Section .), I want to pose the question: How are we
aware of what we can do prior to our reflection or deliberation?
 Shared Action 
The second problem, which I call the taxonomy problem, concerns the
question of whether Bratman and Gilbert target the same phenomena. The
disagreement is often described as a contradiction between theoretically
incompatible positions, but perhaps Gilbert and Bratman simply describe
different phenomena – for example, normative versus teleological types of
coordination. If this is the case, the problem is no longer to provide one
simple formula for all types of shared actions and intentions but rather to
come up with a suitably nuanced taxonomy capable of integrating their
respective target phenomena.
The third problem – the intellectualist problem – concerns how Bratman
and Gilbert account for the awareness condition. They disagree on
whether shared action requires that we normatively rely on or non-
normatively predict the behaviour of others but both argue that the
awareness condition only obtains under conditions of common knowledge
(e.g., Bratman , –; Gilbert , –, , ). In
addition, they both subscribe to fairly standard models of agency according
to which a piece of behaviour counts as action only if it is guided by certain
occurrent mental states. For Gilbert, for instance, when joint commit-
ments come into conflict with other desires on our part, we must actively
remind ourselves of our obligation(s) to the other members of the plural
subject. Some have questioned the adequacy of this model by distinguish-
ing different kinds of self- and other-awareness. Phenomenologists in
particular argue that an adequate understanding of shared actions and
we-experiences in general require that we cash out the awareness condition
in pre-reflective terms (e.g., Schmid a, ; Walsh ; Zahavi
a, ). Similarly, it can be argued from an action-theoretic point of
view that the relation between actions and mental states such as intentions,
beliefs, and desires are far more elusive than Gilbert and Bratman assumes.
In this vein, phenomenologists like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and
Dreyfus claim that actions do not involve an awareness of identifiable
mental states and that the dominant approaches to the philosophy of
action commit an intellectualist error that flies in the face of
everyday experiences.

. Pre-Reflective and Reflective Action

In the philosophy of action, a form of intellectualism is often introduced
by the need to distinguish mere bodily happenings from actions. It counts
as an action if I raise my arm when dancing in a nightclub, but not when
my arm is raised because someone else controls it through an implanted
 Forms of Being-With
microchip. When discussing individual action, it is typically argued that
bodily movement counts as action only if the movement is justified or
caused by a reason, i.e., if it stands in a particular relation to certain mental
states such as desires and beliefs. If we try to expand this conception of
individual agency to also cover cases of shared agency, the number of
mental states that must be entertained by the co-agents multiplies. For
Bratman, for instance, the shared intention that we J involves not only that
I desire that I do my part of J and that I believe that I can do so by
undertaking certain subplans, but that I also intend that you do your part
of J (e.g., that you have the appropriate desires and beliefs), and that this is
common knowledge between us. Gilbert argues that it must be common
knowledge between the participants in the plural subject that they are all
similarly committed to espousing a goal and, presumably, that they are all
committed to taking the individual steps necessary to reach this goal. In
order to be jointly committed, I must presumably know what the goal is,
believe that certain steps will help us obtain that goal, be aware that I have
an obligation to help achieve this goal, and I must know that my co-agents
also have the relevant knowledge, beliefs, and awareness of their obliga-
tions, including knowledge about my knowledge, beliefs, and so on.
In short, things quickly get extremely complicated, and there are reasons
to question whether this model of agency provides a plausible explanation
of all actions. First, the resulting account of shared action, with its
proliferation of mental states, seems to be overly demanding since even
young children are capable of engaging in shared action. Second, and even
more fundamentally, it is questionable that we are consciously aware of the
mental states that presumably cause our actions in the way that standard
philosophy of action suggests. In this vein, phenomenologists have argued
that we often engage in intentional activity without being aware of the
desires and beliefs that supposedly distinguish our actions from mere
bodily movements. As Heidegger notes, we often open doors without ever
thinking about their handles (SZ, /). Similarly, to take an example
from Dreyfus (, ), Larry Bird reports that he would often pass the
basketball to his team mates and only realise that he had passed it a
moment later. In both cases, the agents have no conscious representation
of the reasons that causes or justifies their actions, yet it seems highly
implausible to equate their activity with mere bodily movement of the
kind that could have been induced by an implanted microchip.
This suggests that there is an intermediary level between bodily hap-
penings and the type of actions described in standard philosophy of action.
Let us call this intermediary kind of activity for pre-reflective action. To get
 Shared Action 
a first approximation of what pre-reflective action is, we can contrast it
with bodily happenings, on the one hand, and reflective actions, on the
other hand. Pre-reflective action is distinct from bodily happenings since it
requires that we are aware of ourselves as the ones performing the action in
question. Yet, in contrast to reflective action, pre-reflective action does not
require that we consciously represent our desired goals, our beliefs about
how to achieve them, and, in cases of shared action, our knowledge about
our co-agents. In reflective actions, we are hence aware that our actions are
guided by certain identifiable mental states. In contrast, pre-reflective (or
‘fluid’) actions are, to borrow a formulation from Wrathall, ‘experienced,
not as the deliberative outcome of my aims and desires and beliefs, but as
being drawn out of me directly and spontaneously by the particular
features of the situation, without the mediation of occurrent mental or
psychological states or acts’ (, ). In pre-reflective action, I respond
to the solicitations of my environment without reflecting on what I do.
Rather than feeling that our mental states exercise control over our bodily
movements, ‘we experience the situation as drawing the action out of us’
(Dreyfus , ).
As an intermediary activity, the concept of pre-reflective action might
seem rather unstable. Coming from the direction of reflective action, we
might ask what it is to ‘consciously represent’ certain mental states? Searle
has, for instance, argued that an agent might have a representational
attitude (i.e., an attitude with identifiable conditions of satisfaction that
can be stated propositionally) without, however, consciously thinking a
linguistic propositional thought (, f ). On a more relaxed reading,
one might thus argue that all it takes for behaviour to count as action is
that the agent is able to declare what she is doing as well as the means
necessary to do it. However, there is evidence that even this relaxed reading
of reflective action does not do justice to many everyday activities. It is
often reported by, for instance, expert athletes and musicians that they ‘go
into flow’ in such a way that they cannot explicitly state the steps they
undertake or the conditions of satisfactions that makes them succeed (for
discussions, see Dreyfus and Dreyfus ; Høffding ). As Dreyfus
once put it, in pre-reflective action ‘my absorbed response must lower a
tension without my knowing in advance how to reach equilibrium or what
it would feel like to be there’ (, ). This suggests that some forms of
action cannot be represented or subjected to reflection, while we are
performing them.
But this opposition between action and representation is not only
characteristic in the very moment of action. Some forms of intentional
 Forms of Being-With
activity seem to resist explication all together. As a case in point, consider
the phenomenon known as ‘the twisties’ in which a gymnast suddenly
forgets how to do a twist. This happened to the US gymnast Simone Biles
during the  Olympics in Tokyo. Presumably, the cause of the twisties
is that the gymnast, perhaps due to the pressure of a big competition,
comes to reflect on what is normally done pre-reflectively. As Biles later
reported on social media, her mind and body were somehow out of sync,
and from the reflective stance brought about by her sudden lack of
confidence in her usual bodily and pre-reflective action, she could no
longer ‘fathom’ or ‘comprehend’ what it was to do a twist. If this is correct,
we would be hard-pressed to say that an expert performer like Biles would
have ‘beliefs’ about what it is to do a twist in anything but a metaphorical
sense. Her intentional activity of doing a twist is disturbed by reflection.
Even afterwards, when reflecting on what went wrong and how she usually
does a twist, her pre-reflective action seems to resist reflection and
explication altogether.
Similarly, it is quite plausible that many shared actions can only take
place if they are not disturbed by conscious deliberation and reflection.
Consider, for instance, two people dancing ‘freestyle’ in a nightclub. Some
of their movements are likely to be consciously represented as when one
dancer thinks to himself that in four beats, he will do a spin. Yet, most of
their movements will be spontaneous and intuitive. When the dancers are
‘in the zone’, they do not know how they place their limbs; they simply
respond to the music and to each other fluidly and without thinking. Were
one of them to reflect on their own movements or the movement of the
other dancer, he would presumably feel out of sync not only with his own
body but also with the other dancer and with the music. This constitutes
an intersubjective version of the twisties, which I fear many philosophers,
myself included, recognise.
Coming from the other direction, one might want to press the distinc-
tion between pre-reflective actions and bodily happenings. If, as we saw
Wrathall claim above, pre-reflective action is ‘drawn out of me directly and
spontaneously by the particular features of the situation’, how is that any
different from a mere reflex, for example, when my lower leg kicks in
response to the doctor taping my patellar tendon? Dreyfus occasionally
defends the extreme view that pre-reflective action lacks all self-awareness
(Dreyfus , ), but this, I believe, erases the distinction between
bodily happenings and pre-reflective actions by making pre-reflective
agents out to be a form of well-functioning zombies. In contrast, I will
argue that the key to this question is that in pre-reflective action we have a
 Shared Action 
special kind of awareness of ourselves as the ones performing the pre-
reflective action, although we must be careful not to assume that this self-
awareness must be explained in intellectually demanding terms such as
those of desire, belief, and knowledge. In other words, if pre-reflective
agents are not simple zombies, there must be some measure of success that
is immanent to pre-reflective actions. The pre-reflective agent must be
aware of him- or herself as successfully performing the relevant action. In
the paradigm case, we must be aware not just that a bodily movement is
caused by certain environmental features; instead, we must be aware of
ourselves as those responding to a given solicitation. To get a clearer view
of this immanent measure of success and, especially, how it relates to
shared and not just individual action, we must discuss the nature of pre-
reflective self-awareness in more detail.

.. Self-Awareness in Action

Phenomenological theories of action tend to focus on individual pre-
reflective action, so we need to show that pre-reflective attitudes can refer
to groups and, thus, help us explain the phenomenon of shared action. In
this regard, Schmid’s account of plural self-awareness looks particularly
promising. His view is, roughly, that an attitude is collective if and only
if we are plurally self-aware of it as ours. The plural self-awareness thesis
inscribes our coalescence into the very fabric of intentionality in a way that
does not rely on us being thematically oriented towards each other or on us
holding each other responsible in light of communicatively instituted
commitments. In line with the phenomenological tradition, Schmid
argues that self-awareness does not arise after a subject has reflected on
itself, but is rather an immanent feature of an intentional act so that
whenever the subject directs itself towards some object in the world it
has an implicit awareness of itself as having that experience and being thus
directed. In the case of plural self-awareness, we have a pre-reflective and
non-thematic awareness that certain attitudes are ours, collectively (rather
than mine, individually, or yours and mine, distributively) (Schmid a,
). Consider, for instance, the difference between me watching a beau-
tiful sunset while walking alone and us watching a beautiful sunset while
walking together. Schmid’s claim is that in the latter case we are plurally
self-aware of watching the sunset together in a way that is phenomenally
obvious to us and does not require that we reflect on each other’s presence.
More specifically, Schmid argues that three features of our pre-reflective
singular self-awareness can be translated into the plural: () In terms of
 Forms of Being-With
ownership, plural self-awareness is ‘the basic way in which . . . collective
intentions or beliefs are transparent to ourselves as ours’. It is what
‘formally unifies our social mind’ (a, ). () In terms of perspective,
‘[singular] [s]elf-awareness draws a distinction between the mind, as a
formally unified whole, from the world’ (a, ), and, similarly, the
group has ‘something like an integrated shared perspective’ that involves an
awareness of ‘the difference between how “we”, together, look at things,
and the things as they are’ (a, ). () In terms of commitment,
Schmid argues that both singular and plural self-awareness commits one
to ‘minimal consistency’ (a, ). In the plural case, this becomes a
‘constant normative pressure for coherence between the attitudes of inter-
acting individuals’ (a, ).
The promise of the plural self-awareness thesis is to combine the
awareness condition and the coalescence condition in a pre-reflective
way. Plural self-awareness seems to be compatible with the idea that some
shared actions are pre-reflective because plural self-awareness enables us to
have shared attitudes without us being thematically aware of our co-agents
and without requiring intellectually demanding forms of common knowl-
edge. If, in pre-reflective action, I am aware of myself as being drawn to act
by the situation, we might also occasionally be plurally self-aware that
we are drawn to act by the situation. Further, Schmid suggests that plural
self-awareness is irreducible to and perhaps even developmentally and
explanatorily prior to singular self-awareness (Schmid , a, ).
This relates to what I called the genetic problem, namely, how to account
for the emergence of collective intentions out of presumably basic indi-
vidual intentions without presupposing that the relevant individuals are
already capable of seeing the world from a shared perspective. Schmid
considers this approach to be wrong-headed and rejects the assumption
that collective intentions are somehow built out of individual intentions;
instead, he claims that our capacity to see the world from a shared
perspective is explanatorily basic.
Despite this promise, an ambiguity of Schmid’s account throws doubt
on the utility of plural self-awareness for conceptualising shared action.
More specifically, Schmid glosses over the fact that the phenomenological
tradition, as we have already seen in Chapters  and , offers not one but
two accounts of pre-reflective self-awareness, where one is associated with


Schmid admits that there are important differences between singular and plural self-awareness; for
example, ‘the singular “sense of self” . . . establishes an authoritative point of view for which there is
no equivalent in the plural case’ (a, ), but these are not pertinent for our discussion.
 Shared Action 
Husserl’s conception of the transcendental subject and the other underlies
Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein. As it turns out, it matters a
great deal which type of singular self-awareness we take as our point of
departure, when developing our model of plural self-awareness.
Let me briefly recap the difference between these two concepts of
selfhood:
Atomistic singular self-awareness is Husserlian in spirit. It names the
formal unity of the mind afforded by a transcendental subject that unites
distinct experiences in a single stream of consciousness. In this view, self-
awareness is not something added to the experience but is, rather, an
intrinsic feature of the experience itself; it is what makes an experience
an experience for me. Zahavi calls it the minimal or experiential self by
which he means to suggest that this type of self-awareness is formal as it
says nothing about the personal characteristics of an individual. This type
of self-awareness is atomistic since it is not ‘constitutively dependent upon
social interaction’ (, ). Indeed, atomistic singular self-awareness is
formal in the sense that it is entirely independent of whatever the subject
directs itself towards. It is, rather, a permanent feature of the subject’s
experiential life.
Holistic singular self-awareness is the alternative type of self-awareness
advocated by existential philosophers like Heidegger. For this reason,
I have called call it ‘the existential self’. In contrast to the minimal self,
the existential self targets the pre-reflective sense of self that is intrinsic to
our practical engagement with the world and with other people. Like its
atomistic counterpart, this self-awareness is given non-inferentially and
non-observationally. Yet, holistic singular self-awareness is not formal.
Rather, it is the sense of self that is intrinsically bound to how concrete
situations appear to us in light of our everyday projects and engagement
with other people. It is the pre-reflective self-awareness ‘reflected back to
me’ based on how the world solicits me to act. Formally put,
Holistic singular self-awareness is the sense of self inherent to how a
social and physical environment solicits actions based on (a) the
affordances inflected by the individual’s abilities and dispositions
and (b) the individual’s self-referential commitment to a project that
is furthered through these affordances.


It is somewhat curious that Schmid does not discuss these two types of self-awareness in any detail as
his earlier work, in contrast to his more recent work, endorses an existential conception of
intentionality (, ).
 Forms of Being-With
In this definition, (a) designates that environments afford different things
from different agents based on the agent’s know how. Affordances are,
hence, neither objective nor subjective but a correlation between the
objective relations available in the environment and the abilities and
dispositions of the agent. (b) refers to the fact that not all affordances are
salient. According to Heidegger, what accounts for this fact is how the
agent’s self-understanding ties in with his or her activities. For instance,
teacher-affordances are salient to me if I am committed to the project of
teaching. Heidegger calls this the ‘for-the-sake-of’ thereby suggesting that
for something to be significant or salient an agent must be doing it for the
sake of some particular self-understanding. For-the-sake-of relations tie
agents to the affordances of their environment, because the agent’s prac-
tical self-awareness as this or that determines which set of in-order-to’s,
which practical possibilities, show up as salient rather than as inert affor-
dances. The agent must be self-referentially committed to some project for
an environment to solicit actions.
This is not necessarily a deeply personal type of commitment.
Sometimes the commitment underlies trivial cases like an agent being
drawn to the chips in the buffet rather than the salad. Yet, this trivial
solicitation can only get a grip on the agent if he or she is committed to a
project, say, the project of wanting to taste deliciously deep-fried food. As
we recall, to be an agent is to be ‘a particular style of polarizing the
affordances of a situation into particular solicitations to act’ (Wrathall
, ). This kind of polarisation necessarily requires commitments
because the agent cares about the activity in a way that can succeed or fail,
for example, if the chips turn out to be soggy and under-seasoned.
Affordances only become solicitations once someone cares about or com-
mits to them. Borrowing a few terms from Crowell, we might say that
goals and affordances are ‘telic’, while commitments are the ‘atelic’ under-
pinnings that render these goals and affordances worthwhile to someone
(, ).
Such polarising commitments are self-referential because they resist
further explanation. I am drawn to the chips because I simply care about
tasting them. ‘Self-referential’ does not mean, however, that the agent
deliberately chooses his or her commitments. On the contrary, our


To be clear, self-referential commitments are not necessarily the result of a deliberative process but
usually an expression of our pre-reflective dispositions. As I argue below, some commitments are
deficient in the sense that they are default commitments that result from an agent’s pre-reflective
social dispositions (see Chapter ) while other commitments are disclosive of who the particular
 Shared Action 
commitments are part and parcel of the solicitations. Indeed, in most
cases, we barely take notice of our commitment as we are too busy
pursuing the teleological steps of our project (getting to the buffet, picking
up a plate, scoping over handfuls of chips. . .). Nonetheless, it makes sense
to say that we are non-thematically aware of our commitments since they
are a constituent feature of the teleological steps that thematically occupy
our attention and since they can be brought to the forefront of our
attention if, for instance, our project fails.
This type of self-awareness is holistic because it names a non-thematic
awareness of oneself as normatively engaged with an environment consist-
ing of worldly objects and other people. A non-thematic sense of self, as
committed to this or that project or self-understanding, is reflected back to
us by the solicitations that draw us in.
The distinction between atomistic and holistic self-awareness reveals
two problems for the attempt to use Schmid’s account of plural self-
awareness to understand pre-reflective shared action. First, since atomistic
self-awareness is a permanent feature of our experiential life, it cannot help
us identify the self-awareness necessary to distinguish pre-reflective action
from bodily happenings. We cannot experience the failure of atomistic
self-awareness, since atomistic self-awareness is a necessary condition for
having an experience in the first place. Pre-reflective action implies an
immanent measure of success, but since we cannot experience the success
or failure of atomistic self-awareness, it cannot help us distinguish pre-
reflective action from bodily happenings. If I see my arm soar into the air
because it is triggered by the implanted microchip, this is still an experience
for me. My atomistic self-awareness remains the same. From the perspec-
tive of holistic self-awareness, however, things look very different. On this
account, I would not recognise the activity as mine if, for instance, I am
unaware of any affordances in response to which it would make sense for
me to raise my arm. Here, the activity would fail to satisfy one of the
immanent measures of success characteristic of pre-reflective action,
namely, condition (a) above. We can also imagine another case, akin to
alien hand-syndrome, where my left hand, when triggered by the micro-
chip, gets a ‘mind of its own’ in the sense that it responds purposefully to
affordances in my immediate environment (such as unbuttoning my shirt),

agent is (see Chapter ). While there is no liberum arbitrium and no otherworldly position from
which the agent can pick and choose his commitments in a detached way, Heidegger still accounts
for the specific type of normativity that makes certain projects (and, hence, solicitations) crucial to
the life of an agent while others are tangential and insignificant. In Chapter , I discuss this as the
attributability problem.
 Forms of Being-With
but in this case, my activity does not count as pre-reflective action, because
the activity does not satisfy the other immanent measure of success,
namely, condition (b) according to which I must be self-referentially
committed to a project that is furthered through the affordances to which
my activity responds. In this example, I simply do not recognise the
purposes and responses of the alien hand as part of one of my projects
and, thus, I am not aware of myself as successfully performing the activity
in question.
Second, Schmid fails to recognise that only one form of pre-reflective
self-awareness can be pluralised in shared action. As noted above, atomistic
self-awareness is a permanent feature of the subject’s experiential life; yet,
in accounting for pre-reflective shared action, we need to show how an
environment occasionally prompts us while it, in other circumstances,
prompts me to act in a certain way. The self-awareness intrinsic to shared
action cannot, in other words, be formal in the sense described above, but
must rather be ‘reflected back to us’ from a specific engagement with the
world. Schmid does, at times, acknowledge that social relations and plural
self-awareness are transitory (a, ), yet he seems to consider plural
self-awareness to be analogous to atomistic singular self-awareness, when
he claims that singular self-awareness ‘establishes something like the formal
unity of mind’ and ‘plays the role of Kant’s “transcendental apperception”’
(a, ). Like Zahavi’s minimal self, Schmid’s singular self-awareness is
the unity of a stream of consciousness or the immanence of consciousness
to itself. According to this analogy, Schmid’s plural self-awareness ‘formally
unifies our social mind’ (a, ), that is, it is independent of whatever
is experienced. I contend, on the other hand, that ‘our social mind’ must
be unified by the solicitations that prompt us to respond.
In short, my suggestion is, first, that holistic self-awareness helps us
explain the nature of pre-reflective action and, second, that a plural version
of holistic self-awareness will help us explain the nature of pre-reflective
shared action. Extrapolating from the previous definition, we get the
following (preliminary) definition of this type of plural self-awareness:
Plural self-awareness is the sense of self inherent to how a social and physical
environment solicits actions based on (a) the affordances inflected by a


As a third variation of this example, we can imagine that the person controlling my hand through the
microchip knows me so well that they make my hand respond only to the environmental affordances
that aligns with my self-referential commitments. This activity would be distinguishable from
reflective action, since my hand would then move without me consciously representing the mental
states that in normal deliberative circumstances make it do so, but indistinguishable from pre-
reflective action. Yet, it seems to me that this is still very different from a mere bodily happening.
 Shared Action 
group’s abilities and dispositions and (b) the group’s self-referential com-
mitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances.
The upshot of this redefinition is that it retains the main pro of Schmid’s
original proposal by not assuming shared action to involve the intellectu-
ally demanding representation of mental states and that it, in addition,
allows us to account for the transience of plural self-awareness by way of
our relations to other people and our environment while remaining true to
the phenomenology of pre-reflective action.

. Joint Goals and Joint Commitments

I will now make the case that the holistic model’s way of tying together
self-awareness, other-awareness, and object-awareness provides a highly
nuanced account of shared actions that effectively integrates both teleo-
logical and normative features of shared action. In the next section, I will
spell this out in a taxonomy of individual and shared actions, but first we
must consider, more generally, how the idea that the environment solicits
actions from an agent can be translated from individual actions to
shared actions.
I suggested that a solicitation requires two elements: (a) the affordances
inflected by the agent’s (or agents’) suite of abilities and dispositions and
(b) the agent’s (or agents’) self-referential commitment to a project that is
furthered through these affordances. In this formula, (a) refers to the in-
order-to’s, while (b) refers to the for-the-sake-of.
When it comes to (a) affordances, we should first note that, for human
agents, environmental affordances are inherently connected to the various
relations that connect us to other people. The hammer affords hammering
because the craftsman has been commissioned by someone to make the
product. Here the environment affords something in light of a back-
grounded understanding of the practical possibilities of someone else.
Similarly, when two people are present in the same immediate environ-
ment, each agent pre-reflectively tracks and responds to the behaviour of
the other. For instance, I pre-reflectively step aside in order for you to pass
me in the narrow hallway. Our immediate understanding of our environ-
ment is thus already saturated by our non-thematic understanding of what
others can and will do. This pre-reflective tracking and responsiveness will
sometimes coalesce into joint affordances. In such cases, something
appears as an affordance for us rather than just for me. This happens, for
instance, when an environment affords something that I could not have
 Forms of Being-With
done alone. Imagine, for instance, that you participate in the Black Lives
Matter protest in The Centre in Bristol. A statue of the slave trader
Edward Colston towers above this public space. You are enraged by this
commemoration, and suddenly you see that someone has tied a rope
around the statue. With a few of your fellow protesters, you start pulling
the rope, ultimately toppling the statue. The environment solicits you to
act together in light of the group’s abilities and dispositions in a way that it
simply would not do if you had walked past the statue on your own.
It is more controversial whether (b) the commitments or for-the-sake-
of’s can be put in the plural. How can a group self-referentially commit to
some of these affordances? It is often assumed that for-the-sake-of’s are
individual, but I want to make the case that self-referential commitments
can be joint in the sense that my self-referential or atelic commitment to a
project constitutively depends on your being similarly committed.
To see this, let’s take an example from Heidegger that explicitly
describes joint goals but which, with a bit of modification, can also shed
light on joint commitments. Heidegger describes two campers, where one
chops wood while the other peels potatoes:
Here we will say without hesitation: They are with each other – and not just
because they are in the vicinity of each other. They are with one another,
although they are occupied with different things, yet for the same purpose,
namely, with the preparation of the meal and, further, with taking care of
their stay in the cabin; it belongs to the essence of Dasein that they do it for
the same purpose. (GA, f )
At the face of it, this looks like Bratman’s teleological account. The two
campers engage in shared action because they intend the same goal,
namely, the preparation of the meal and the stay at the cabin, and they
have meshing subplans. For Heidegger, however, the two campers are
oriented towards their joint goal pre-reflectively, whereas Bratman con-
strues this as a deliberative process. Peeling potatoes is significant in order
to make the meal, which is significant in order to stay at the cabin, but the
campers do not actually think about their joint goal. It is simply part of the


Haugeland claims that existential commitments are ‘crucially not social’ (, ), and Crowell
maintains that only the ‘I-myself’ – the first-person singular – can be authentically committed to the
norms that governs its behaviour (e.g., , ). Sánchez Guerrero‘s () Heideggerian
approach to collective emotions (what he calls ‘affective intentional community’) is a notable
exception. He agrees that Heidegger’s for-the-sake-of should be understood as a tacit self-reference
intrinsic to our intentional acts, but that it is also possible that ‘others are referentially included in the
intentional structure of the emotions at issue by way of a tacit self-reference, and not by way of a
second- or third-personal indication’ (Sánchez Guerrero , ).
 Shared Action 
intentional background that guides their actions. If we imagine that one
camper had a cold and cancelled, but the other camper went on the trip
anyway, he could still unreflectively engage in chopping wood and thus his
state of mind, understood internalistically, would remain the same. Yet,
Heidegger would insist that without the tacit reference to his friend, the
activity would no longer make sense in the same way since the non-thematic
goal would no longer be a joint goal but now only an individual goal.
However, we must also account for the for-the-sake-of that, ex hypothesi,
affects how the environment of wood and potatoes solicits actions from the
campers. Suppose that the campers are a father and his teenage son. Father and
son have planned their camping trip a few weeks in advance but in the days before
their departure, the teenage son becomes inexplicably moody. The son is
conscientious and does not try to bail on the camping trip, although he complains
a lot. During the trip, he constantly listens to angry music with his headphones,
and he keeps a gloomy look on his face while peeling the potatoes. Do father and
son correctly coalesce in shared action? They did, of course, coordinate their
actions in pursuit of the joint goal of camping. However, another sense of the we
seems missing. Despite their coordination and their joint goal, father and son
perform, to some extent, their tasks next to rather than with each other.
Neither Bratman nor Gilbert sees any substantial difference between
these two examples. Bratman would say that each intends that they go
camping, that they have correctly meshing subplans, and that they operate
under conditions of common knowledge. For Gilbert, the decisive part is
that father and son constituted a plural subject when they expressed their
initial readiness to go on the camping trip and that they emulated a single
body in doing so. On this account, the attitude of the sulky teenager is
beyond rebuke, and, tellingly, Gilbert maintains that joint commitments
hold even under coercive circumstances (). In contrast, I believe that
there is a significant difference between the two cases and that the latter
case misses a crucial feature of genuine joint action even though a joint
goal is intended and achieved.
In brief, the difference consists in how the father and son relate to their
joint goal. What is similar between the two cases is the set of in-order-to’s
and what differs are the for-the-sake-of’s. The happy campers have a joint
goal and a joint commitment. Father and son go camping as an end-in-
itself, as we might say with reference to Kant. They go camping for the


Heidegger sometimes compares the for-the-sake-of with Kant’s end-in-itself in order to underline
that this type of commitment cannot be grounded in any further commitment. In , he for
example writes: ‘[Dasein] is for the sake of its own capacity-to-be-in-the-world’ and this constitutes
 Forms of Being-With
sake of doing something together, and the affordances of the situation prompt
them to act in a specific way due to this joint commitment.
Like the happy campers, the father to the sulky teenager intends to go
camping for the sake of doing something with his son. Yet, the teenager
does not share this commitment. He is motivated by a different for-the-
sake-of than his father. Perhaps the son simply goes camping because he
does not want to get blamed for cancelling the trip. In any case, the son
pursues the joint goal in light of an individual rather than joint commit-
ment. Consequently, the father’s for-the-sake-of breaks down as it consti-
tutively depends on being shared by the son. This alters what the
environment solicits from him. The possibility of lighting a fire is now
less salient than, say, the possibility of going to bed early. The trip is a
failure for the father, not because father and son did not carry out the joint
goal that they had agreed upon, but because he tried to do something for
the sake of doing something together with his son and, alas, his son did not
share this commitment.
This shows that the existential joint commitment is not tantamount to a
reflective endorsement. It is pre-reflective in the sense that it is an integral
feature of how a shared environment solicits people to response. It is the
condition in light of which environmental affordances prompts us to act.
As a commitment, it retains a normative element, however, since our
project can succeed or fail in a way that is independent of the mere
teleology of the action. The sulky teenager shows that the success or failure
of shared action is not only measured by whether we achieve the goals that
we aim for but also by whether others on which our commitment depends
turn out to be similarly committed. In contrast to Schmid, who under-
stands joint commitment as the ‘constant normative pressure for coherence
between the attitudes of interacting individuals’ (a, ), the existential

the ‘structural element that motivated Kant to define the person ontologically as an end, without
inquiring into the specific structure of purposiveness and the question of its ontological possibility’
(GA, /).

Sánchez Guerrero makes a comparable point, when he argues that it is possible for a number of
individuals to pursue not only the actualisation of a certain possibility but also to do so as a group,
that is, by understanding themselves as group-members who act for the sake of the ‘wellbeing’ or
‘flourishing’ of the group that they constitute (e.g., , ). I agree with Sánchez Guerrero that
it is important to distinguish between the joint possibility or goal that the individuals try to
actualise, on the one hand, and whether they do so as a group or as individuals, on the other
hand. I think, however, that it is misleading to say that the individuals must act for the sake of the
group’s wellbeing or flourishing, since this seems to require a prolonged concern for the group and
that we entertain certain beliefs about the desires and goals of the group that lie beyond the concrete
goal currently being pursued. Instead, I propose that the joint for-the-sake-of requires that the
individuals are committed to the project only if the others are similarly committed.
 Shared Action 
account of joint commitments does not concern coherence between atti-
tudes as such but the fact that we sometimes care about things because we
simply assume this care to be shared by others. As the disappointed
father might complain: ‘I just wanted us to do something together
for once!’
It is central to Gilbert’s reflective concept of joint commitments that they
provide us with obligations and entitlements. For her, joint commitments are
the battle ground on which we coerce others to do their parts by invoking the
rights and duties that we conferred upon each other when we expressed our
readiness to undertake a joint commitment. Gilbertian joint commitments
are thus in no way opposed to reflection. In fact, they come most fully into
view when we explicitly remind each other and ourselves that we are jointly
committed to do something as a single body. Existential joint commitments
are very different for the father only feels the need to explicitly remind the son
of their agreement to go camping because their existential joint commitment
has already gone awry. When pre-reflective shared action succeeds, things go
smoothly and we don’t feel the need for overt normative exchanges. This need
only arises because the campsite no longer solicits father and son to spend
quality time with each other. Thus, when the father explicitly reminds his
son – and perhaps himself – that they agreed to go camping and have a good
time, their pre-reflective action has already been replaced by a reflective
substitute in which we recall and represent our intentions, beliefs, common
knowledge, obligations, and so on.
At this point of the camping trip, I imagine that things can go one of
two ways. Either the reproach is successful and the son tells what has been
bothering him after which father and son can finally enjoy their trip. In
this case, the shared action becomes, once again, pre-reflective. Or father
and son sit in awkward silence for the rest of the night deliberately forcing
themselves to remain seated although the fire no longer solicits them to sit
there, although the fire has lost its magic. In this case, the shared action
remains reflective.


To put the point differently, existential joint commitments do not concern the coherence or
consistency of our attitudes due to the fact that when we act pre-reflectively, we do not question
whether or not the attitudes of our co-agents cohere with our own. We simply act on the tacit
assumption that they do. The question whether our attitudes do in fact cohere only arises, when
pre-reflective shared action breaks down and we enter a reflective mode. This means that each of us
might experience something as a shared action to which we are jointly committed even if it later
turns out that we were wrong to tacitly assume others to be thus committed. Joint commitments are
intrinsic to the first-person perspective but fallible. As Heidegger once noted, in a passage where he
uses ‘decision’ [Entscheidung] to refer to the for-the-sake-of: ‘no individual among you can in any
manner ascertain about how any other individual has decided’ (GA, /; GAA, ).
 Forms of Being-With

. A Taxonomy of Individual and Shared Actions

I suggested earlier that something counts as shared action when an
environment solicits behaviour based on (a) the affordances inflected
by a group’s abilities and dispositions and (b) the group’s self-referential
commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. We now
see that the logical operator should not be a conjunction but an
inclusive disjunction, since (a) affordances and (b) self-referential com-
mitments can be singular or plural independently of each other. We
thus end up with a fourfold taxonomy of how an environment solicits
actions that combines the goal orientation of Bratman’s account and
the normative dimension of Gilbert’s in a single phenomenological
framework.
In the simplest case, both goal and commitment are singular:
An environment solicits action based on (a) the affordances inflected
by an individual’s abilities and dispositions and (b) the individual’s
self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by
these affordances.
The environment affords certain possibilities because of what the individ-
ual is able and disposed to do. These affordances are made into solicita-
tions by the agent’s commitment to actualise one rather than another
possibility. For example, my laptop affords me to work. This affordance is
a solicitation because I try to be an academic. Of course, the solicitation
depends on anonymous social institutions but does not refer directly to
other people and is hence an individual action, or, more precisely, an
individually coordinated individually committed action.
Another possibility is that
An environment solicits action based on (a) the affordances inflected by
a group’s abilities and dispositions and (b) an individual’s self-referential
commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances.
If we pluralise (a) the affordances but not (b) the commitment, we have
what I’ll call coordinated action or, technically, jointly coordinated individ-
ually committed action. My example with the sulky teenager falls in this
category because the teenager acts in pursuit of a joint goal although he is
committed to this goal as an individual. The teenager pursues a joint goal
for his own sake.
The third type of action pluralises (b) the commitment but maintains
that (a) the affordances are given to an individual:
 Shared Action 
An environment solicits action based on (a) the affordances
inflected by an individual’s abilities and dispositions and (b) a
group’s self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered
by these affordances.
In individually coordinated jointly committed action, I do something for the
sake of us. In this case, several individuals could, for instance, collectively
agree to emulate not, as Gilbert would have it, a collective body but rather
collectively agree to emulate individual bodies. This might be of little real-
world significance but the combination does explain a few counterexam-
ples that trouble other accounts of collective intentionality. Searle, for
instance, discusses a case where a group of business school graduates,
who were taught Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, get together
on graduation day and swear to each other that they will help humanity by
getting as rich as they can by acting as selfishly as they can (, ). Qua
their promise to each other, the individuals may act selfishly for the sake of
doing something together, even though they only rely on their own
individual abilities and dispositions in doing so.
Joint action, in contrast, requires the highest degree of social cooperation
since it pluralises both (a) affordances and (b) commitments:
An environment solicits action based on (a) the affordances inflected
by a group’s abilities and dispositions and (b) a group’s self-referential
commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances.
In jointly coordinated jointly committed action, multiple agents are jointly
solicited to act on affordances inflected by their joint abilities and dispositions.
Sometimes this requires close cooperation, for example, when a group of
protesters topple a statue. At other times this involves cooperation between
multiple activities that could in principle be carried out by individuals sepa-
rately, for example, chopping wood and peeling potatoes. Either way, joint
action also requires that the agents self-referentially commit to these affordances
as a group. They commit self-referentially as a group when the commitment of
each individual constitutively depends on the others being similarly committed.
They thereby realise a joint goal for the sake of doing something together.
Of course, one might object that real actions are much messier than this
taxonomy suggests. It might be unclear to me whether I dance for the sake
of us or whether I dance for my own sake. Although difficult to discern at
times, the commitment is still operative in the solicitation. This is clear
from the fact that shared action can fail in terms of not only joint goals but
also joint commitments. Sometimes I simply get the feeling that other
people are not committed to what ‘we’ do, that they only do it for
 Forms of Being-With
themselves. If this lessens or otherwise changes the salience of the situation,
my commitment was indeed joint.

. Discourse
Let us turn to the genetic problem. We have seen that both Gilbert and
Bratman accounts for the transition from individual intentions and actions
to shared intentions and actions by arguing that there must be a thematic
interrelation between the individuals (either deliberate planning or a
mutually expressed readiness to form a joint commitment). Schmid, in
contrast, argues that the we is primary and explanatorily basic. For him, it
appears that the we is a fundamental explanans that cannot be explained
further (cf. Zahavi , ). The problem with Schmid’s alleged solution
to the genetic problem is, however, that it merely reverses the individual-
istic accounts so that the issue is no longer how to get from individual
intentionality to collective intentionality but how to get from collective
intentionality to individual intentionality. If the we is explanatorily and
developmentally prior to the I (a, f ), how are individual I’s carved
out from this primordial we?
Heidegger proposes less a solution than a dissolution of the genetic
problem. He rejects the methodological assumption that our interpretation
must proceed by reducing a given phenomenon to its building blocks, for
example, that we must explain the we in terms of individual I’s (or, in
Schmid’s case, individual I’s in terms of the we). Instead, he hopes to
identify a single structure or mechanism that makes both I, you, and we
possible without postulating that one of these phenomena is more funda-
mental than the others. As we have already seen, he claims that I, you, and
we are equiprimordial, not in the strong sense that we constantly live as an
I, a you, and a we, but in the weak sense that they are different modes of
the same basic process. I, you, and we are all explananda, and the shared
world is the fundamental explanans.
Following this approach, we should not ask how individual intentions
make shared intentions possible but rather which process transforms one
kind of solicitations (e.g., those of individual action) into another kind of
solicitation (e.g., those of shared action). I believe that this is the role
discourse [Rede] plays in SZ. Discourse is the expressive process in which


We find a similar problem in the later Merleau-Ponty’s conception of intercorporeality as the
‘primordial we’ that precedes and makes possible the differentiation into distinctly embodied I’s and
you’s (, ).

This is the stronger sense in which understanding, affectivity, and discourse are equiprimordial.
 Shared Action 
saliences are shared between people. To see how the account works, we
must, however, clarify a few textual issues that mar it.
As I mentioned in Section ., Heidegger distinguishes discourse from
‘language’ in the sense of the totality of words and linguistic utterances.
Discourse is, he claims, ‘[t]he existential-ontological foundation of lan-
guage’ (SZ, /). It is the ‘“significant” articulation of the intelligi-
bility of being-in-the-world, which belongs to being-with, and which in
every case maintains itself in some definite way of concernful being-with-
one-another’ (SZ, /). We have seen that significance and intelligi-
bility are constituted by the interrelation of in-order-to’s and for-the-sake-
of’s in a relational whole, so when Heidegger claims that discourse is what
articulates this structure and thus maintains a definite way of concernful
being-with-one-another, it seems he has in mind the process through which
a relational whole is shared between several Dasein, that is, the way in
which certain possibilities become salient to several people. Discourse
includes linguistic utterances insofar as these serve to communicate or
express saliences, but, as we have seen, Heidegger has a much wider range
of phenomena in mind than just speech acts.
This distinction between discourse and language has caused commentators
like Dreyfus and Haugeland to translate Rede with telling in the sense of
‘being able to tell the time, or tell the difference between kinds of nails’
(, ). On this reading, Rede simply refers to our ability to tell things
apart, to respond to them in a differentiated manner in our everyday practices
(e.g., Haugeland , ). Blattner (, f ) argues that whenever we
tell things apart and respond to them according to their respective purposes,
our behaviour will by itself express something along the lines of: This thing
is typically used for this purpose. Carman (, ) and McMullin (,
), however, object that Dreyfus, Haugeland, and Blattner fail to do justice
to the communicative or expressive aspect essential to discourse. Not only
is it somewhat perverse to use the term Rede to refer to a process that does
not necessarily include other people, on this account it is also rather difficult
to see what the existential of discourse adds to the structure of affectivity
and understanding outlined previously in SZ.
The problem is that Heidegger’s formulations are ambiguous. On the
one hand, he writes that ‘the very sense of discourse is discourse to others
and with others’ (GA, /, his italics), thereby indicating that
discourse only takes place when saliences are in fact shared between people.
Similarly, Heidegger claims that discourse is a ‘matter of being-with-one-
another becoming manifest in the world’ (GA, /). This seems to

Cf. Carman (, ).
 Forms of Being-With
warrant Carman’s and McMullin’s claim that it is essential to discourse
that others are actually attuned to the world in the same way that we are,
that discourse succeeds in bringing about ‘co-understanding’ (SZ, /
, /) and ‘co-affectivity’ (SZ, /). On the other hand,
however, discourse can hardly depend on the ontic presence of others
insofar as it is an existential or ontological feature of Dasein’s being-in-the-
world in much the same way that being-with does not depend on others
actually being there (SZ, /). This means that although discourse is
indeed ‘discourse to others and with others’, it still makes ‘no difference for
the essential structure of discourse whether there is a fixed address directed
to a specific other or not’ (GA, /). Or, as he formulates the point
in , ‘[w]e are always speaking [sprechen], even when we do not utter a
single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not
particularly listening or speaking but are attending to some work or taking
a rest’ (GA, /, see also Withy ).
Heidegger ultimately uses the term ‘discourse’ in two related but
ultimately distinct ways. In some places, ‘discourse’ refers to the existential
feature according to which our behaviour always already expresses the
whole of significance that guides our comportment. In other places,
‘discourse’ refers to the way in which this expression is received by others,
i.e., the process in which a whole of significance is made manifest to
others. The former is a general and constitutive capacity or feature of
Dasein, which is, hence, operative even when we do not talk and no one is
around. In this sense, I still express or communicate something when
I attend to some work all by myself. The latter is a process, which is
enabled by this general and constitutive capacity or feature, the actualisa-
tion of which obviously requires that someone is present to understand
what I express through my behaviour. In short, Heidegger’s concept of
discourse refers both to the process in which saliences are shared between
people and the condition of possibility of this process.
The reason for this ambiguity is that Heidegger attempts to avoid the
model according to which communication is ‘a matter of transporting
information and experiences from the interior of one subject to the interior


The fact that discourse is both an ontological feature and an interactive process is important if we
are to determine just what it adds to the structure of affectivity and understanding. In short, as an
ontological feature, discourse formally ensures that the whole of significance that guides my
comportment is indeed responsive to that of others, and as an interactive process with a concrete
set of peers, discourse gives content to this responsiveness. In the words of Haugeland, it is ‘one of
the basic cultural mechanisms by which the practical and cognitive achievements of the past are
preserved and propagated’ (, ).
 Shared Action 
of the other one’ (GA, /), that is, in order to avoid a model
according to which social phenomena – such as communication – are
explained in terms of pre-existing individual phenomena. As an ontological
feature, discourse refers to the ontological fact that we always already
‘participate in what is manifest’ (GA, /); that we both necessarily
express matrices of saliences and are constitutively responsive to the
matrices of salience that are expressed in the behaviour of others. This is
what makes interpersonal understanding (where we understand the exis-
tential projections of the other) and shared action (where our existential
projections are synchronised) possible.
As we have seen, discourse does not necessarily require linguistic utter-
ances but should be understood in the ontologically broad sense of
communication according to which all purposeful behaviour has the
potential of making certain possibilities salient for other people. Through
our words, our actions, or our gestures, we make the sharedness of the
world phenomenally transparent to each other. In this way, a nod or a
simple exchange of glances might transform an awkward situation so that it
is no longer an awkward situation for each of us but now a slightly less
awkward situation for us together. So, although discourse does not struc-
turally depend on the actual presence of others, it does ensure that we have
a potential for collective intentionality that is only fulfilled once several
agents have a sense that they are similarly attuned to the world.
Discourse has four structural elements: () That which is talked about
[das Beredete], () that which is said [das Geredete], () the communication
[die Mitteilung], and () the intimation [Bekundung] (SZ, /; GA,
f/f ). To cut a long story short, () what is talked about refers to an
entity or a relation in the world, while () that said calls attention to
something particular about this entity or relation; that is, it highlights
certain affordances, for example, by saying that ‘the chair is upholstered’
(GA, /). () Communication underlines that discourse is inher-
ently expressive, because discourse also lays these affordances out in the
open. It makes them manifest in a way that others can and sometimes
must respond to. When communication is successful, the said and talked
about affordances are raised into salience for multiple interacting agents.
Finally, () intimation refers to how the speaker necessarily ‘expresses itself’
in communication (SZ, /; GA, /) in the sense that the
speaker necessarily reveals something intimate about itself by way of
informal expressions like ‘intonation, modulation, the tempo of talk’
(SZ, /). Intimation refers to how the speaker herself stands in
relation to the manifested saliences. For instance, her tone of voice or
 Forms of Being-With
the look in her face might reveal that she desires or is disgusted by
whatever is raised to joint attention.
In contrast to Gilbert’s account, according to which communication is
paradigmatically explicit and linguistic, Heidegger’s concept of discourse
targets all expressive behaviour, linguistic and non-linguistic. Pre-reflective
agency is always discursive in the sense that it expresses a certain concern
with the world. Occasionally, this discursive feature of agency causes
others to respond to the world in a way that converges with our own
way of responding. Once, we are aware of this convergence, we have pre-
reflective shared action. Sometimes the convergence is, of course, estab-
lished through linguistic utterances, but, in line with my discussion of the
camping trip, the measure of success of such communication is often
located at the pre-reflective level. As Heidegger writes regarding linguistic
utterances, the point is rarely to transfer ‘a store of heaped up propositions’
(or a set of occurrent mental states) between two independent individuals
(GA, /). Instead, ‘communication . . . should be seen as possi-
bilities by which one Dasein enters with the other into the same funda-
mental comportment toward the entity asserted about’ (GA, /).
In this vein, the point of discourse is not to ensure that our attitudes are
consistent, that we have the same pieces of knowledge and the same desires
and beliefs, but to orient agents towards the same saliences or possibilities
in a way that is immediately obvious to them.
That Dasein’s existence is necessarily discursive means that shared
action is not something that is somehow added on top of individual action.
Rather, in both individual action and shared action, our environment is
inherently shared with others, our behaviour is inherently expressive for
others, and our way of comporting ourselves is inherently responsive
to others.


The four elements of discourse also reveal the ways in which discourse might malfunction. In fact,
these ways of malfunctioning are essential to discourse in the sense that we cannot have discourse
without at least the possibility of these kinds of malfunctioning. The first form of malfunctioning
occurs when we lose sight of that which is talked about [das Beredete] in favour of that which is said
[das Geredete]. We exchange the appropriate glances and glosses with others (or ourselves) although
we do not really understand what we are talking about; that is, without having the appropriate
affective or practical grasp of the saliences that our discourse is supposed to make manifest. This
malfunctioning is what Heidegger calls idle talk [Gerede]. We can also imagine another form of
malfunctioning (unnamed by Heidegger) in which one speaker balances that which is talked about
[das Beredete] and that which is said [das Geredete] but where the communication [Mitteilung] fails
to convey this to others so that although they understand the concepts that the first speaker uses and
the inferences that he makes, this never sinks into the matrices of salience that guides their
comportment. This we might call idle communication.
 Shared Action 

. Variations of the We

In a lecture course from , Heidegger discusses the collective
intentionality of the students present in the lecture hall. He says that
‘[t]he belongingness to the lecture is that which is essential; it is grounded
in the listening-together, in the integration of the individuals in the
audience. This [plural] you of the audience is divided into the [singular]
you’s, who are addressed as such, out of this relationship’ (GA, /; cf.
GAA, ). So, instead of the audience being a mere summation of
individual I’s, the students understand each other as participants in the
we of the audience, just like the lecturer understands them as a plural you.
In the situation, the individual students make sense of each other and
themselves on the basis of the group rather than the other way around.
Thus far, the analysis of the lecture hall follows the principles I have set
out above. However, things take an eerie turn, when Heidegger goes on to
argue that not only is each individual student nested within the collective
of the audience, the audience is by itself nested within the collective of the
university, which, in turn, is nested within the collective of the people:
We, who we are now here, as we bluntly pronounce our present and local
Dasein, are involved in the happening of education of a school, which ought
to be the University of Academic Education. . . . As we are fitted [eingefügt]
in these demands of the University, we will the will of the State, which is
nothing but the will to rule [Herrschaftswille] and the form of rule
[Herrschaftsform] of the people over itself. We as Dasein submit ourselves
[fügen uns] in a peculiar manner into the belonging of the people, we stand
in the being of the people, we are this people itself. (GA, f/f )
The argument is that each individual forms part of a we by virtue of
intending the joint goal of going to the lecture, and that each individual
also, thereby, intends to get an education and, thereby, intends to prepare
him- or herself for getting a job, which, ultimately, means that each
individual intends to make his or her own contribution to ‘the inner order
of the people’ (GA, /). Joint goals nested within joint goals thus
transforms the ‘small and narrow we of the moment of the lecture’ into the
large-scale we of the people (GA, /; GAA, ).
Despite his politically motivated attempt to nest one we within another
we thereby making the transformation seem continuous, there are signif-
icant differences between the two types of we. In contrast to the small we
of the lecture hall, the large political we is both () temporally prolonged in
the direction of past and future and () highly hierarchical in its way of
coordinating behaviour and assigning social roles.
 Forms of Being-With
Before analysing the large-scale we of history, society, and the people in
the following two chapters, we should note that, despite their differences,
the politically charged discussion of the people presented in GA does in
fact follow the general account of shared action presented above. For, as
Heidegger points out, a joint goal is a necessary but not sufficient condi-
tion for participating in the joint action that constitutes the people. It is
not enough that we intend to go the lecture, to get an education, to get a
good job within the Reich and so on. In addition to having the joint goal,
we must also be jointly committed to the joint goal. In Heidegger’s terms:
‘How the we is, respectively, is dependent upon our decision, assuming
that we decide’ (GA, /; cf. GAA, ); ‘it is a matter of decision
whether we want to act jointly, whether we want to act jointly or
contrariwise’ (GA, /; cf. GAA, ).
Accordingly, there are two ways in which the joint action of the people
can fail. First, it might simply fail to achieve its joint goal. The assumed in-
order-to relations, the assumed nesting of goals, might break down for
some reason. ‘[I]t is not at all settled that these arrangements are, with all
of their inner necessities, capable of actually altering the happening of
education of this university’ (GA, /). Alternatively, the joint action
might fail not because the joint goal is not brought about but because the
joint commitment fails. As he says in one of the lectures, with what
I imagine to be a scornful tone of voice, ‘one can accomplish all of these
services without being touched by the happening’ (GA, /). Heidegger
thus points out that one or several of his students might work hard to earn
good grades, to get their degrees, to get the good internships, to get the good
jobs and so on, so that it looks, from the outside, as if they are good, hard-
working and committed citizens. Yet, they might still completely lack the
patriotism appealed to by Heidegger and only do these things for their own
sake (GA, /; GAA, ). Thus, they might do all the right things
and still fail to enact the spiritual transformation envisaged by Heidegger.
Heidegger blames his students – and, later, his countrymen in general –
for lacking commitment to the joint action of the people. This deserves a
more careful analysis, and I will return to it in Chapter  (especially
Section .) and Chapter . To conclude this chapter, let me simply note
that this line of argument is structurally similar to my example with the
sulky teenager. Ironically, the sulky teenager refusing to jointly commit to
the project of camping now becomes a political dissident, who sits in the
lecture hall condemning Heidegger’s endorsement of the Nazi state.
  

Two Types of Social Normativity

The shared world is not only shaped by small-scale interactions between

distinctly embodied Dasein but also permeated by prolonged, community-
wide social normativity. Heidegger accounts for two distinct types of such
social normativity. The first type is what I will call anonymous social
normativity. Those who participate in anonymous social normativity have
only a minimal awareness of the nature, extent, and origin of the social
norms that they follow. This is the type of social normativity famously
analysed by Heidegger under the heading of the Anyone [das Man]. The
second type of social normativity is what I will call historical social norma-
tivity. Historical social normativity requires an awareness of both the
extent and the origin of the social norms that characterise a specific
community. Those who participate in historical social normativity are
aware that the social norms that they follow are neither universal nor
permanent. Heidegger accounts for this type of social normativity through
his analysis of Dasein’s historicity and its relation to ‘the community’
[Gemeinschaft] and ‘the people’ [Volk].
This chapter clarifies the phenomenological structure of these two types
of social normativity and thus shows both what they have in common and
how they differ from one another. What emerges is a distinctly
Heideggerian account of conformity and community according to which
social normativity requires neither behavioural regularity, rational coordi-
nation, nor tacit agreement. Instead, the Heideggerian view is that social
norms are, first and foremost, a type of comportmental pattern that guides
how individuals understand themselves and others. For Heidegger, social
norms can be given in one of two ways: in a way that obscures and in a way
that makes manifests their nature as historical and fragile. This has far-
reaching consequences for how we understand ourselves and the commu-
nities in which we live.


 Forms of Being-With

. Anonymous Social Normativity: The Anyone

Heidegger launches his analysis of the Anyone with the question: Who is
everyday Dasein? Following the previous discussion, we can discern an
answer. First, the sense of self inherent to Dasein is ‘reflected back to it’ by
environmental solicitations. Second, Heidegger stipulates that the solicita-
tions to which Dasein is drawn are typically shaped by social norms. This
means, third, that when Dasein understands itself through solicitations
inflected by social norms, it comes to see itself not as a unique individual
but simply as one participant among many in the normative structure of a
given group. Hence, Heidegger’s answer: The who of the anonymous
social normativity is the Anyone (SZ, /).
Heidegger’s analysis of the Anyone is surrounded by interpretative
challenges. First, it is unclear whether the social normativity of the
Anyone is an essential feature of Dasein’s being or whether it fades away
in authentic existence. Second, the examples used to illustrate the Anyone
point in many different directions thereby making it difficult to distinguish
its essential from its accidental features. Although I will have something to
say about the consistency between the analysis of the Anyone and the rest
of SZ, my focus in this section is to provide a consistent and plausible
account of the essential features of the Anyone.
To see why this might be challenging, let me start by describing, in very
broad strokes, some of the features commonly attributed to the Anyone.
First, the Anyone ensures an uncodified and unconscious responsiveness
to social norms. Dreyfus (), for instance, exemplifies the Anyone with
distance standing. As he points out, there is always a certain distance at
which we are most comfortable when interacting with others even though
we are not normally aware of this. This distance varies according to both
our relation to those with whom we talk, but other factors such as whether
the other has the flu or whether we are in a room with a lot of noise also
determines what we feel is appropriate. Without thinking about it, we are
drawn to a certain distance, and this, argues Dreyfus, shows that we
respond to fluid and non-codified social norms while barely realising it.
Second, the Anyone provides some kind of predictive modelling that
makes it easier for individuals to cooperate. Heidegger himself argues that
the Anyone coordinates our typical interaction by offering a set of social
roles that can be inhabited by anyone. As he puts it:
One [man] is what one [man] does. The everyday interpretation of Dasein takes
its horizon of interpretation and naming from what is of concern in each
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
particular instance. One [man] is a shoemaker, tailor, teacher, banker. Here
Dasein is something which others also can be and are. (GA, /)
The Anyone offers norms of conduct that regulate the interaction between
individuals so that instead of understanding an individual as a unique
person we engage with them qua their social or professional roles. Such
social norms offer predictive models through which we predict how
others behave.
Third, the Anyone puts normative constraints on our individual pref-
erences. SZ, for instance, argues that it provides a standard for aesthetic
judgments so that we ‘take pleasure and enjoy ourselves 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’ (SZ, f/). We adjust to the opinion of others so that our own
opinion about something coheres with theirs without us even being aware
of this coherence or conformism. Importantly, it seems that the norm to
which we cohere need not be the common sense of the majority – the
‘great mass’, as Heidegger calls it. Instead, Heidegger has in mind a form of
subtle normative pressure towards coherence with the (assumed) opinions
of a possibly small peer group.
These features are not incompatible but they do point in different
directions. Distance standing has little practical utility, while the coordi-
nation of social roles in part serves to heighten productivity through a
division of labour. Further, the norms of distance standing resist codifica-
tion, but social roles are, at least in part, regulated by explicit rules and
obligations. Aesthetic judgments often involve linguistic capacities, and yet
distance standing is pre-linguistic, and the bodily activity central to most
social roles is something in between.
So, what are the essential features of the Anyone? To answer this
question, I compare the general type of social normativity of Heidegger’s
Anyone with David Lewis’ account of conventions and Searle’s account of
institutional facts and background power (Section ..), reconstruct the
structure of the Anyone as Heidegger presents it in SZ (Section ..), and
spell out some of the inconsistencies in his account that divides the
secondary literature.

.. Conventions, Institutions, and Power

Lewis’ approach to conventions is game-theoretic. Assuming that individ-
uals are instrumentally rational agents, he focuses on what he calls
 Forms of Being-With
coordination problems, namely, ‘situations of interdependent decision by
two or more agents in which coincidence of interest predominates and in
which there are two or more proper coordination equilibria’ (, ).
A coordination equilibrium is a combination of decisions that amounts to
an optimum for the involved agents so that no one would be better off if
any one agent were to act otherwise.
Lewis then offers the following definition of a convention:
A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are
agents in a recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if it is true that,
and it is common knowledge in P that, in any instance of S among
members of P,
() everyone conforms to R;
() everyone expects everyone else to conform to R;
() everyone prefers to conform to R on condition that the others do,
since S is a coordination problem and uniform conformity to R is a
coordination equilibrium in S. (, )
Lewis later amends this definition (cf. , , ), but this formu-
lation is sufficiently detailed for our discussion. What emerges is a
picture of conventions as the coordination achieved among rational
agents whenever these agents all know that a behavioural regularity will
be of mutual benefit to them. An example of such a convention is the
tacit agreement that whenever a phone line is cut off the initial caller
will call back, while the other waits. Assuming that the caller prefers to
pay for the call rather than not talk, this is a coordination equilibrium
since if both redial, they get the busy signal and if both wait, they wait
in vain.
Anyone-norms differ from Lewisian conventions on at least four counts.
First, Lewis’ conventions require common knowledge. Yet, at least some of
the phenomena covered by anonymous social normativity involve no
knowledge in the traditional sense, let alone complex and demanding
common knowledge. In distance standing, for instance, we are not explic-
itly aware of the optimum distance at which to talk to one another. If
someone steps a little too close, we will automatically step back, but we
will often do so without thinking about it. Heidegger even says that none
of the phenomena characteristic of the Anyone ‘is in any way conscious or
intended’ (GA, /).
Second, Lewis’ game-theoretical approach focuses on coordination
problems, that is, situations in which several agents have an interest in
their coordination so that each prefers to conform if everyone else
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
conforms. Lewis thereby assumes that interests are explanatorily prior to
conventions. Heidegger, on the other hand, takes the opposite view claim-
ing that certain social norms are prior to the interests of individuals. ‘[W]e
take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as anyone takes pleasure’ (SZ, f/).
Instead of being a product of the individuals’ interests, the Anyone shapes
the interests of the individuals from the outset. What is more, Heidegger
never suggests that the individuals would prefer to conform to Anyone-
norms if they were given the choice. If we combine the idea that Anyone-
norms are unconscious and unintended and the idea that the Anyone
outlines the various social roles available within a group, the Anyone seems
to include structural phenomena like racism and sexism that a large portion
of the population would oppose if they were given the choice.
Third, in contrast to Lewis, Heidegger does not assume that everyone or
almost everyone must conform to R for R to become a social norm. Lewis
admits that perfect conventionality is rare and admits that it comes in
degrees (, ff ). Nonetheless, he still maintains that the fraction of
the members of P that satisfies conditions ()–() must be ‘slightly below
one’ (, ) for the regularity to count as a convention. Heidegger, on
the other hand, makes no assumption about how many must conform to a
social norm for it to qualify as an Anyone-norm. He even argues that in
certain cases deviance from what is regular behaviour within a population
falls within the domain of the Anyone. ‘We shrink back from the “great
mass” as anyone shrinks back’ (SZ, f/).
Most importantly, Heidegger does not share Lewis’ central assumption
that the phenomenon in question is a regularity in behaviour. Anonymous
social normativity is not essentially a behavioural regularity, although it
often reveals itself in behaviour. The problem is that behaviour is in
principle available from a third-person perspective. Heidegger’s conception
of the Anyone, on the contrary, targets a social conformity inherent to the
first-person perspective. The inquiry into the who of everyday Dasein is an
inquiry into the I in the formally indicative sense that it is an inquiry into
the first person, into the Dasein as the entity which is ‘in each case mine’
(SZ, /; cf. /f ). The Anyone is, in other words, not a beha-
vioural regularity, available to an independent observer, but a conformity
internal to how Dasein comports itself towards the world. It is a comport-
mental pattern – a socially inflected way of experiencing the world.
A promising feature of Searle’s social ontology is that it resists the
reductive tendency to focus on mere behaviour. In contrast to Lewis,
Searle believes that social and institutional facts rely on collective
intentionality:
 Forms of Being-With
Just behaving in certain ways, where behavior is construed solely in terms of
bodily movements, is not sufficient for a community to have a queen or to have
slaves. In addition, there would have to be a certain set of attitudes, beliefs, etc.,
on the part of the members of the community, and this would seem to require
a system of representations such as language. (Searle , )
For Searle, collective intentionality is fundamental to all forms of social
cooperation including that of anonymous, community-wide normativity.
As he sees it, social normativity requires ‘a system of representations such
as language’ in order to go beyond the temporary embodied interaction
discussed in the last chapter. Language enables us to make epistemically
objective statements about a set of entities that are ontologically subjective in
the sense that they depend on our recognition or acceptance (, ).
This is what Searle calls institutional facts.
Institutional facts are made possible by a form of collective intention-
ality that is symbolic in the sense that the relevant agents not only react to
their physical environment but also to ‘status functions’ imposed on the
environment through their collective recognising that X counts as Y in C.
Here X is a brute fact or a set of brute facts and Y is a status function
imposed upon X within a given context, C. A status function assigns a new
function to a person or object that this person or object could not perform
by its physical nature alone. As such, institutional facts function as
constitutive rules.
As Searle construes it, institutional facts are created through declarations
with the logical form: ‘We make it the case by Declaration that the Y status
function exists in context C’ (, ). Often the Y is imposed upon an
X, so that X now counts as Y in C, but sometimes Y is ‘free-standing’, that
is, without a discernible, physically independent X, and sometimes Y refers
to a range of objects that all satisfy certain conditions. It is common to all
these cases that when we create a status function, we generate ‘deontic
power’, namely, a codified relation between Y and a person or a set of
persons S so that S has the power or the obligation to perform certain acts
(, ff ). This is how Y creates new functions.
Above we saw Heidegger reject that Anyone-norms are conscious or
intended. This seems to fly in the face of Searle’s claim that institutional
facts are the product of collective intentionality and that their epistemic
objectivity depends on their being collectively recognised. Searle, however,
admits that ‘the process of the creation of institutional facts may proceed
without the participants being conscious that it is happening’ (, ),
although he still maintains that he has arrived at the logical structure of
institutional facts, whether or not the relevant agents are aware of it. In
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
other words, institutional facts do not necessarily require the explicit
agreement expressed through declarations but take the form of tacit agree-
ments, that is, a coordination where everyone acts as if such a declaration
had been made. The Anyone, however, does not require even this weaker
form of coordination. Often Anyone-norms resists the codification central
to Searle’s analysis because they vary from situation to situation in a way
that is impossible to specify in terms of objective criteria and impossible to
formulate in explicit rules. Dreyfus puts this point well with reference to
the practice of distance standing: ‘[T]he agent need not be sensitive to a
class of physical distances in a certain type of situation that is constituted as
the appropriate distance; the agent need only be skilfully moving to lower a
tension’ (, ).
The paradigm of Searle’s conception of institutional reality is tacitly
agreed-upon rules. In contrast, Heidegger targets a much more fluid and
informal type of social normativity. Formulated differently, Searle adopts
what we might call a top-down approach to social reality according to which
the most cognitively demanding types of rule-following are taken to be the
paradigm of all types of rule-following. In contrast, Heidegger adopts a
bottom-up approach that emphasises how explicit rules are made possible by
the fluid and non-codifiable drift towards social coherence characteristic of
social agents that navigate their social environment pre-reflectively.
Making a similar point, Carman has criticised Searle for having ‘no
positive account of social skill as distinct from nonnormative causal
mechanism on the one hand, and conscious rule-following on the other’
(, ). Once again, we need to identify an intermediary level of
agency that lies between mere behaviour and fully reflective action.
In recent work, Searle responds to this objection by adding a second
type of power to the deontic power that follows from explicit or tacit rules.
He thus uses the term Background/Network power to refer to ‘a type of
power in society that is not codified, is seldom explicit, and may even be
largely unconscious’ (, ). For Searle, the Network refers to a largely
unconscious set of intentional states that are presupposed by our conscious
intentional states in the way that my beliefs about movie theatres and the
price of admission are presupposed by my intention to go see a movie
(, ). The Background refers to the nonintentional ‘set of abilities,
capacities, dispositions, ways of doing things, and general know-how that
enable us to carry out our intentions and to apply our intentional states
generally’, for example, the way that my intention to drive to the movie
requires my ability to drive a car, which again presupposes the cars’ ability
to travel across the surface of the earth and so on (, f ). The idea of
 Forms of Being-With
Background/Network power is that this largely unconscious and taken-for-
granted structure contains ‘a set of norms of behavior’ that constraints the
behaviour of group members and induces them to conform.
However, Searle also believes that in order for something to count as
power it must be possible to specify who exactly has power over whom
(, ). But who exercises power over whom in the case of
Background/Network power?
The answer I am suggesting is that in these cases anybody can exercise power
over anybody. If you are a member of the society, and as such you know that
you share the norms of that society, then you are in a position to exercise
power because of your capacity for imposing informal sanctions against
those who violate the norms, in the knowledge that your sanctions will be
supported by others. (Searle , f )
Searle acknowledges (, ) that this resonates with Heidegger’s
concept of the Anyone because it, too, emphasises a form of unconscious
sensitivity to norms that offers community-wide normative constraints on
our behaviour.
The extension of Background/Network power is like that of Anyone-
norms, but the two differ insofar as the authority of Background/Network
power arises from a fear of social sanctions: ‘The subject conforms because
a failure to conform elicits the expected sanctions’ (Searle , ).
Heidegger, on the other hand, never mentions social sanctions as the
reason to conform. This is phenomenologically crucial. The experience
of an individual who decides to do A because he or she fears the social
sanctions that will follow from doing B differs quite dramatically from the
experience of an individual who does A out of pure conformism. In the
first case, two possibilities present themselves to the individual, who then
actively chooses A after thinking over the consequences that follow from B.
In the second case, the individual does not face two possibilities but only
one, which he or she actualises in a semi-automatic and unreflective way.
Heidegger makes clear that he has the second case in mind when he states
that ‘Dasein’s everyday possibilities of being are for the others to dispose of
as they please’ and when he points out that by ‘others’ he does not mean
everyone else but me (i.e., those prepared to punish me for doing B);
rather, ‘one belongs to the others oneself’ (SZ, /).
More importantly, the concept of Background/Network power rests
uneasily in Searle’s general social ontology. Searle claims that the pre-

See also Beinsteiner () who, comparing Heidegger and Foucault, argues that the power of the
Anyone does not rely on repressive mechanisms.
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
intentional Background/Network contains a form of power. But how did
this Background/Network power come about? Searle’s standard answer
would be that Background/Network power, as a social fact, is brought
about by collective intentionality. But if Background/Network, as Searle
argues, enable us to ‘apply our intentional states generally’ (, ), it
cannot be the product of collective intentionality. For Searle, Background
and Network provide the non- and semi-intentional relations that make
intentional states possible. Thus, if certain norms are included within these
relations, these norms cannot themselves be the product of a subset of
intentional states. Searle is right to acknowledge a type of social norm that
is uncodified, seldomly explicit, and largely unconscious, but his positive
account of this type of social norm is, at best, an unsystematic ad hoc
move, and, at worst, outright inconsistent.

.. The Structure of the Anyone

The comparison with Lewis and Searle has been largely negative and only
showed us what the Anyone is not. However, the points of divergence
discussed above can be arranged in a way that specifies five crucial issues
that must now be elaborated positively. We must account for the what,
how, why, who, and whence of the Anyone.
What is the general type of regularity at stake in the Anyone? Lewis’
conventions are behavioural regularities, whereas both Searle and
Heidegger target what we might call an intentional (or pre-intentional)
pattern. That is, both Searle and Heidegger describe a regularity that
requires the first-personal perspective of intentionality, although, as we
have just seen, they disagree whether this perspective is best grasped in
reflective or pre-reflective terms. For Heidegger, the ground level of
intentional activity is our semi-automatic way of being drawn to act on
environmental solicitations. The same thing holds when it comes to social
normativity. That we usually encounter entities based on ‘the totality of
involvements with which the Anyone is familiar’ (SZ, /) means that
we typically follow the in-order-to’s and for-the-sake-of’s made familiar to
us by the Anyone. It offers the standards or norms through which we
interpret the entities that we encounter. This shows that the Anyone is not
a behavioural regularity but a regularity inherent to how we comport
ourselves to the world based on how we (unconsciously) assume that
anyone would comport themselves. The Anyone is, as suggested above, a
comportmental pattern.
 Forms of Being-With
How does this anonymous social normativity work? For Lewis, coordi-
nation is ensured once all the relevant agents have common knowledge
that each of them prefers their collective conformity to the behavioural
regularity over and above any given uncoordinated alternative. Searle holds
that social facts generally take the form of tacit agreement, where several
agents act as if they had collectively assigned or declared the existence of a
status function. Heidegger rejects both of these options arguing that they
presuppose the existence of fully formed (instrumentally rational or lin-
guistic) agents (cf. Thompson ). In contrast, he believes that anony-
mous social normativity is a constitutive feature of agency, or, as he prefers
to put it, that the Anyone is an existential (SZ, /).
As his account cannot rely on full-blown rational or linguistic opera-
tions, Heidegger must ground the Anyone on low-level functions.
Although he does not put it in these terms, I believe that he takes the
Anyone to be reproduced by the weight of precedent alone. The Anyone
constitutes an ‘inconspicuous domination by others’ that Dasein as being-
with ‘has already taken over unawares’ (SZ, /). This suggests that
we perceive people behaving in a certain way and that we tend to
unconsciously mimic their behaviour. Heidegger calls this tendency to
mimic the behaviour of others for ‘distantiality’ [Abständigkeit]. We might
think of this as a tendency to act in a measured manner. He thus explains
distantiality by saying that ‘[i]n taking care of the things that one has taken
hold of, for, and against others, there is a constant care as to the way one
differs from them’ (SZ, /). We measure ourselves against others,
and we restrain ourselves so as not to differ too much from them. Taking
their behaviour as precedent, we unconsciously adopt it as the standard for
how one should act in similar situations. This standard is normative
because it becomes the predictive model through which we understand
the actions of others and because it guides our own actions. Once we
mimic this behaviour, we ourselves reproduce the precedent thereby
‘enhanc[ing] the power’ of the Anyone (SZ, /).
Why do people conform to such arbitrary social norms? What is their
normative force? Lewis claims that people act in coordinated ways because
it is mutually beneficial to them. Searle believes that power motivates us
because of our fear of (legal or social) sanctions. Both explanations imply


In this regard, Heidegger’s conception of anonymous social normativity is comparable to Ruth
Millikan’s () interpretation of ‘natural conventions.’ Yet, Millikan argues that natural
conventions, like all conventions, require knowledge of ‘genuine alternatives’ (, ). Heidegger
rejects this claim as phenomenologically incorrect.
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
that an agent acts deliberately by choosing A over B because A aligns with
the agent’s interests. As we saw above, conformity to Anyone-norms does
not require this kind of deliberation. In fact, the normative force of
Anyone-norms lies precisely in that we cohere to them without delibera-
tion and reflection. ‘The more openly the Anyone behaves, the harder it is
to grasp, and the slier it is, but the less is it nothing at all’ (SZ, /).
We tap into a set of norms fluidly and unthinkingly. Another way of
putting this point is that we conform to these norms neither for the sake of
us as in the case of jointly committed action nor for the sake of me as in
individually committed action but ‘for the sake of the Anyone’ (SZ, /
). In contrast to when I do something ‘for the sake of me’ or ‘for the
sake of us’, doing something ‘for the sake of the Anyone’ is not significant
to anyone in particular. When conforming to Anyone-norms we are thus
‘committed’ to something by default. This means that the Anyone provides
the standard possibilities that guide Dasein in the absence of overriding
concerns. As Heidegger puts the point, the Anyone causes Dasein to be
‘indifferent’ to its own being (SZ, /, /).
Who enforces anonymous social normativity? For Lewis, conventions
require that almost everyone in a population conform to a regularity. For
Searle, an institutional fact comes with deontic power that must be
recognised both by those concrete people who have the power and by
those concrete people who are subjected to the power. The who of
Background/Network power, on the other hand, refers to anybody within
a specific community. Heidegger, however, writes: ‘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’ (SZ, /
). This means that the Anyone does not refer to a specifiable fraction of
a given population, nor even to everyone or even an objective average within
a specific community. Rather, when we are under the guise of the Anyone,
we are completely unaware of the extent of the social norms that we follow.
When Heidegger says ‘anyone’, he does not mean anyone within a distinct
community, as Searle does, since this still implies an awareness that the
social norms that we follow have a limited extension. Instead, the norm in
question is assumed to apply to anyone in general. It is assumed to be a
universal default. As Mulhall has pointed out, Dasein’s indifference to itself
‘is realized in an essentially undifferentiated existence’ (, ). It is, of
course, almost never correct to assume that a social norm is a universal


In Chapter , I contrast the idea that the Anyone commits us to something by default with a
particular kind of normativity – attributability – which is closely linked to authenticity.
 Forms of Being-With
default. We easily realise this when we reflect on the social norms in
question. But this is exactly the point: Someone under the guise of the
Anyone does not reflect on the social norms that they conform to and are,
hence, not aware of their limited extension.
Finally, we ask: Whence does anonymous social normativity come?
What grounds it? Lewisian conventions are grounded in the joint rational
pursuit of interests. Searlian institutional facts are grounded in collective
intentionality. Admittedly, Heidegger does not provide an explicit answer
to the whence-question, but in light of the analysis of being-with presented
above, I’ll attempt to construct an argument, which I take to be largely
consistent with the textual evidence and to have the added advantage of
clarifying some of the more difficult concepts and notions in Heidegger’s
analysis.
Fredrik Westerlund has recently argued that the main motive that
underlies Dasein’s sensitivity to social pressure and conformity is ‘our
desire for social affirmation’. He writes,
We want to be affirmed and accepted by our group and we dread the
prospect of incurring its hostility and contempt. This motive goes deep in
us and tends to fuel both our self-perception and our identity. . . . Whereas
seeing ourselves as likeable and affirmable incurs feelings of pride and self-
confidence, seeing ourselves as unlikeable and despicable makes us feel
embarrassment and shame. (Westerlund , )
There is something to be said for Westerlund’s reconstruction. It seems
quite plausible that Heidegger’s concept of the Anyone is indeed supposed
to show how our ‘desire for social affirmation’ propels us to measure
ourselves and others in light of social norms. But, as Westerlund (,
) notes, Heidegger’s own account does not invoke the moral psycho-
logical terminology of ‘motives’ and emotions like ‘pride’ and ‘shame’. The
reason for this is, I believe, that although our desire for social affirmation
might be one of the surface phenomena that Heidegger wish to under-
stand, his aim is to uncover the ontological foundation of our responsive-
ness to social norms. Westerlund’s moral psychological reconstruction
presupposes rather than illuminates this foundation. To put it bluntly,
our capacity for feeling, for instance, shame and for seeing ourselves as
unlikeable because we fail to conform to some social norm clearly pre-
supposes that we have a basic understanding of what a social norm is.
Although our basic desire for social affirmation might be a ‘deep’ or ‘basic’
motive for us, it is, as a mere motive, unsatisfactory as an answer to the
whence-question of social normativity.
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
Instead, I think Heidegger’s notion of distantiality is supposed to answer
the whence-question. This is clear once we see that it involves triangulation.
Distantiality, I suggested, refers to how we constantly care about others, what
they do, and the way in which we and our actions differ from them. In short,
we measure ourselves against others. In SZ, Heidegger formulates this idea in
dismissive terms, but we have already encountered the systematic foundation
of this point. In triangulation, we use three elements – the shared environ-
ment, the other, and ourselves – as measuring points, and we achieve an
understanding of all three by correlating environmental stimuli and purposive
responses. The other’s behaviour will cause us to refine the field of possibilities
through which we navigate the world; that is to say, whatever the other does
affects how we understand our environment and ourselves. In this sense, we
are, qua triangulation, constitutively responsive to the behaviour of others. If,
as I have argued, triangulation is a transcendental feature of Dasein, it follows
that we measure ourselves against the other, that ‘there is a constant care as to
the way one differs from [others]’ (SZ, /).
Triangulation alone does not entail conformity, and thus we have yet
to account for Dasein’s basic understanding of what a social norm is. If,
however, the triangulating creatures are also temporal creatures with habits
and memories, certain patterns of purposive responses will sooner or later
reproduce themselves by the weight of precedent. Only at this point, do
we get anonymous social norms of the type described by Heidegger.
In discussing different types of rule-following, Haugeland arrives at a
similar story:
[C]ommunity members effectively promote similarities in how they and
their fellows are disposed to behave relative to circumstances. This pre-
supposes that they can tell who behaved how in what circumstances, and
how that compares with what others would have done; it also presupposes
that they can modify their own and each other’s dispositions in the
direction of conformity. . . . Assuming the dynamic parameters are com-
patible with stability, this institutes a community with a common set of
social customs and mores. (Haugeland , )
Haugeland takes a process of stabilisation, incurred by our ability to track
how the behaviour of others correlates with our shared environment, to be


Carman’s interprets distantiality as a form of ‘standoffishness’ that instils a ‘departure from everyday
understanding in its mundane form’ in which ‘normality and abnormality as such become the focus
of our concern’ (, ). But this cannot be right, since it makes distantiality a rare
phenomenon. Rather, I contend with Dreyfus, that distantiality ‘denotes an essential structure of
all Dasein’s activity that inconspicuously reduces difference and so performs the ontological function
of establishing norms and thus opening up a shared human world’ (, ).
 Forms of Being-With
the genesis of group formations. Community members respond to how
others behave, they track this behaviour over time, and thereby they come to
modify their own behaviour in the direction of conformity. Heidegger’s
account uses two interrelated and partly overlapping terms, averageness and
levelling down, to describe a similar process of stabilisation. He says that
distantiality ‘is grounded in the fact that being-with-one-another concerns
itself as such with averageness [Durchscnittlichkeit]’ (SZ, /). The
Anyone concerns itself with averageness in the sense that it orients itself
towards what is assumed to be the standard, that is, the universal default:
‘The Anyone maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which
belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not,
and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it’ (SZ, /
). The concern for averageness is the drift towards a default that occurs
once we are continuously exposed to each other in distantiality.
At the level of lived experience, the result is a ‘levelling down of all
possibilities of being’ (SZ, /). Once we are continuously exposed to
a precedent – a certain way of doing things – we unconsciously accept it as
the standard way of doing things. It thereby becomes the salient way of
doing things. So, unless something exceptional happens – unless the tool
breaks down, we face a new unprecedented situation, or we consciously
decide to try something new – our possibilities of acting and being will
simply be the possibilities prescribed by the Anyone.
In conclusion, the Anyone provides social norms in the form of com-
portmental patterns reproduced through the weight of precedent that we
conform to by default under the tacit assumption that it is a universal
default. Furthermore, the Anyone is an existential feature of Dasein
because it follows from our continued (qua averageness) exposure to or
triangulation with others (qua distantiality).

.. Heidegger’s Inconsistency

So far, my focus has been the internal issue of providing a consistent
account of Heidegger’s notion of anonymous social norms. This leaves us
with the external issue whether the Anyone is a necessary feature of Dasein
or whether it can be transcended in authenticity.
Olafson has argued that the Anyone is, despite Heidegger’s claim to the
contrary, an existentiell rather than existential issue and that authenticity describes
a Dasein that awakens out of this tranquilized state and reclaims its
responsibility and power of individual choice in a very radical way.
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
Heidegger describes this recasting of Dasein’s life into the mode of authen-
ticity as ‘choosing choice’ and it issues in a state of resoluteness
(Entschlossenheit) in which we accept our true situation in a freedom we
could hardly claim if Das Man were writing the story of our lives. . . .
Dasein has options that are independent of Das Man. (Olafson , )
This reading places Heidegger among existentialists like Sartre, who
emphasises the ideal of an individual’s radical freedom from the constraints
of conformism. In short, the authentic individual transcends the Anyone
and the norms provided by it.
In contrast, conventionalists like Dreyfus and Carman argue the
Anyone denotes ‘the socially constituted normative standards that make
our practices intelligible as the practices they are, and so render our
behavior sensitive in distinctive ways to salient aspects of our practical
world’ (, ). This means, as we saw in Chapter , that the norms of
the Anyone constitute the ‘source of intelligibility’ (, ff ).
According to Dreyfus, the fact that SZ allows both readings is simply that
Heidegger himself confused the ontological issue of conformity (the ‘con-
stitutive norms’ for intelligibility provided by the Anyone [, ])
with the ontical issue of conformism (the Kierkegaardian disdain for ‘the
crowd’ [, ff]).
My account of the whence-question clearly shows that I take the Anyone
to be a necessary feature of Dasein. It is what we get once we combine
triangulation and time. Yet, I too find SZ to be undeniably inconsistent.
Sometimes Heidegger claims that ‘authentic being-one’s-self . . . [is] an
existentiell modification of the Anyone’ (SZ, /), and sometimes he
claims the opposite, namely, that the Anyone ‘is an existentiell modifica-
tion of the authentic self’ (SZ, /). I will not attempt to explain away
these inconsistencies, but I do think that the account of the Anyone just
outlined sheds light on why commentators are so divided.
If I am right that anonymous social normativity follows from Dasein’s
temporal and triangulating structure, it is possible to reconcile at least
some of the crucial aspects of the two positions. More specifically, I believe
that Dreyfus and Carman are right to claim that the Anyone is an
existential, and that Olafson is right to deny their claim that a given set
of Anyone-norms is the source of intelligibility. This reconciliation rests on
an important ambiguity in the notion of the Anyone. Sometimes ‘the
Anyone’ refers to the pressure or the drift towards coherence in the form of
stabilised social norms; sometimes it refers to these social norms

See, however, Blattner ().
 Forms of Being-With
themselves. It is crucial that we keep these two apart, and I suggest, in
keeping with the above, that we call the former for ‘the Anyone’ and use
‘Anyone-norms’ to refer to the latter.
Carman and Dreyfus argue that the Anyone constitutes ‘the socially
constituted normative standards that make our practices intelligible as the
practices they are’ (, ) and that ‘the source of the intelligibility of
the world is the average public practices through which alone there can be
any understanding at all’ (, ). In doing so, they wrongly take the
Anyone to refer to a set of distinct social norms, which, they argue, is
necessary for the a as b-structure of intelligibility. Similarly, when Olafson
claims that the Anyone can be overcome, he also takes the Anyone to refer
to a distinct set of social norms, although he believes that this set is
ultimately arbitrary.
In my account, the existential or ontological aspect of the Anyone is
the drift or pressure towards coherence because this follows from the
friction caused by our continued exposure to others’ behaviour. But the
claim that there is a drift towards stabilised social norms is not equivalent
to the claim that any given set of social norms have a quasi-transcendental
status, that a set of social norms determines – rather than merely shapes –
how we interpret the world. Indeed, any given set of social norms is an
arbitrary product of the social environment in which we live, and once
exposed to a form of behaviour that does not fit our predicted projection of
possibilities we will, qua distantiality and triangulation, revise this projec-
tion to achieve a better interpretative fit. This is how anonymous social
normativity shapes or informs interpersonal understanding without
completely determining it. In this sense, Dasein does indeed have options
that are independent of Anyone-norms (Olafson , ).
Unfortunately, as Olafson (, ) rightly points out, Heidegger does
not have a term that unequivocally means ‘social norms’ or even ‘social
practice’. The best candidate is, in my view, what he calls ‘the public’.
Heidegger’s series of inferences seem at least to go in this direction when
he claims that ‘[d]istantiality, averageness, and levelling down . . . consti-
tute what we know as “the public”’ (SZ, /). Usually, the public
‘controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is
always right’ (SZ, /), not in the sense that it corresponds to things
as they are in themselves but in the sense that it provides a set of social


See also Carman‘s suggestion that discourse ‘constitutes the bridge between the anonymous social
normativity of das Man and the concrete interpretive practices of individual human agents’, because
there is a ‘generic drift of discourse towards anonymity and banality’ (, ).
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
norms – a measure of what is appropriate in a given situation – the validity
of which is taken for granted. Heidegger then goes on to characterise the
public in clearly contemptuous terms: The public ‘is insensitive to every
difference of level and of genuineness and thus never gets to the “heart of
the matter” [“auf die Sachen”]’; it ‘obscures everything and presents that
which has been covered over as what is familiar and accessible to everyone’
(SZ, /).
Olafson argues that what is thus covered over is the possibility of an
authentic life beyond the confines of the Anyone. But this contradicts
Heidegger’s claim that authenticity is not ‘an exceptional condition of the
subject that has been detached from the Anyone’ (SZ, /). So, which
phenomenon is covered over by the public? My suggestion is that the
public covers over the fact that any given set of social norms is ultimately
arbitrary by presenting it as a universal default. Thus, the public brings a
‘tranquillised self-assurance – “being-at-home”, with all its obviousness –
into the average everydayness of Dasein’ (SZ, /). As members of
‘the public’, we take for granted a standard of intelligibility, an average; we
take it to be the standard of intelligibility. What is thereby suppressed or
covered over is ‘everything unfamiliar’ (SZ, /) and ‘exceptional’
(SZ, /), which is to say, all the possibilities of doing and being
something that do not fit this socially inflected comportmental pattern.
For this reason, Heidegger associates the Anyone with the inflexibility of
what he calls ‘stubbornness’ [Versteifung] (SZ, /, cf. Blattner
, ).
Olafson is right that Dasein can indeed overcome any given set of social
norms that happen to shape its way of interpreting the world. But it
cannot (pace Olafson) overcome the normative pressure towards coherence
and relatively stable models of prediction. What is essential – indeed, what
is a transcendental feature of Dasein – is not its conformity to any specific
set of social norms but its generic drift towards social norms.

. Historical Social Normativity: Community and People

Although we are not aware of it, Anyone-norms are ultimately contingent
products of our socialisation into a specific community. This makes
anonymous social normativity a historical phenomenon. Yet, within SZ
there is a tension between Division I’s account of everydayness and the
Anyone, on the one hand, and Division II’s account of historicity and the
people, on the other hand. Heidegger writes for instance:
 Forms of Being-With
In accordance with the way in which historicity is rooted in care, Dasein
exists, in each case, as authentically or inauthentically historical. It becomes
plain that Dasein’s inauthentic historicity lies in that which – under the title
of ‘everydayness’ – we have looked upon, in the existential analytic of
Dasein, as the horizon that is closest to us. (SZ, /)
This suggests that everydayness has an ‘authentic’ counterpart in historicity
and that there is a distinction – perhaps even opposition – between the
Anyone and what Heidegger calls the ‘happening of community, of the
people’ (SZ, /). We are thus faced with a second type of
community-wide normativity. Let us call this historical social normativity.
How does historical social normativity differ from anonymous social
normativity if both types of normativity are historical phenomena?
This section aims to clarify the nature of historical social normativity
and its relation to anonymous social normativity. I argue (Section ..)
that Heidegger’s distinction, despite appearances, is unlike the sociological
distinction between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft because it does not
concern itself with the content of social norms but only how they are
given. I then show (Section ..) that the main characteristic of historical
social normativity is that the same content, the same social norms, are now
disclosed as historical rather than as universal defaults. Finally, I elaborate
(Section ..) on three crucial features of historical social normativity – its
inherent fragility, its demand for social coherence, and its connection to
joint (or, rather, communal) commitments – by drawing on Heidegger’s
thought in the ‘s and ‘s.

.. Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft

At first glance, the distinction between anonymous social normativity and
historical social normativity corresponds nicely to the distinction between
society [Gesellschaft] and community [Gemeinschaft] prevalent in German
sociology around . When he introduces the distinction in his
Community and Society from , Ferdinand Tönnies takes community
and society to constitute two extremes of a historical development. For
him, community is the ‘natural state’ and ‘complete unity of human wills’
in which ‘the relationship between differently situated individuals is pre-
determined and “given”’ (Tönnies , ). Communities consist of
tightly knit and naturally arising social relations, for example, kinship
relations. Society, on the other hand, is characterised by individualism
and the instrumental rationality of modern commodification and market
economies. Here people live alongside each other
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
without being essentially united . . . . As a result, there are no activities
taking place, which are derived from an a priori and pre-determined unity
[of people] . . . . On the contrary, everyone is out for himself alone and
living in a state of tension against everyone else. (Tönnies , )
For Tönnies, Modernity marks the decline of community and the corre-
sponding rise of society. He sees this as a regrettable development arguing
that ‘bad community’ is a contradiction in terms (, ).
Max Weber adopts Tönnies’ distinction but uses it in a slightly different
fashion. He takes it to concern two analytically distinct social processes
rather than a historical development. For Weber, ‘communalisation
[Vergemenschaftung]’ refers to a type of social relation that rests largely on
‘a subjectively felt (affectual or traditional) mutual sense of belonging’
(, ). As in Tönnies, communalisation implies a form of collectiv-
ism. ‘Sociation [Vergesellschaftung]’, on the contrary, refers to social rela-
tions that rest on ‘a balance of rationally motivated interests’, which is
typically based on the ‘rational agreement arrived at through mutual
consent’ between independent individuals (, ). The family exem-
plifies the first type of social relation, whereas the exchange of commodities
and the obligations established in legal contracts exemplify the second.
It would not be unreasonable to assume that Heidegger adopted this
sociological distinction for his own philosophical purposes. In fact, Scheler
had already paved the way for this in Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal
Ethics of Value published between  and . Although Scheler uses
the terms life-community [Lebensgemeinschaft] and society [Gesellschaft] as
logical and ethical categories rather than as sociological categories, the
thrust of his argument is in continuity with that found in Tönnies and
Weber. The life-community is a ‘suprasingular unit of life and body’ that
‘hovers between individuals like a stream of experience which has its own
laws’ (, ). This suggests that the life-community is explanatorily
prior to its individual members, that is, that community cannot be a
product of individuals with interrelated intentions and common knowl-
edge (, ). Rather, each individual draws, so to speak, his or her
respective intentional acts (‘coliving, cohearing, coseeing, cothinking’, etc.)
from the collective. In the domain of ethics, this amounts to a form of
‘solidarity’ in which ‘self-responsibility, when it is experienced, is built
upon an experience of coresponsibility for the willing, acting, and effecting
of the whole community’ (, ).
In contrast to the organic unity of life-community, society is ‘an
artificial unit of individuals’ where ‘all relations are experienced by each
as coming from his individual ego’ (, ). Accordingly,
 Forms of Being-With
life-community leads to ‘boundless trust’, whereas ‘distrust of all is the
basic attitude in society’ (, ). Life-community and society are
logically distinct forms of coexistence, although the latter modifies and
presupposes the former (, ).
Despite disagreeing whether the distinction is historical (Tönnies),
empirical (Weber), or logico-ethical (Scheler) in nature, all three agree
that community and society are two fundamentally different forms of
social life. This is evident from the fact that they describe and contain
different types of social relations (affective and kin-like relations versus
rational and transactional relations) and that they rest on opposed con-
ceptions of the relation between the individual and his or her community
(collectivism versus individualism).
Appearances notwithstanding, Heidegger’s distinction between the
Anyone and the people does not map on to the distinction between society
and community. He claims repeatedly that the Anyone is an ontological
rather than ontic or empirical category. Therefore, it does not correspond to
a subset of empirical social relations such as those within a market
economy. He even warns us that the Anyone ‘is by no means intended
to make an incidental contribution to sociology’ (GA, /). Further,
as we have already seen, Heidegger’s conception of social life is holistic
through and through. Anonymous social normativity testifies to rather
than contradicts this holism. On this account, the individualism charac-
teristic of modern, Western societies is a product of a set of underlying
holistically constituted social processes.
The difference between anonymous social normativity and historical
social normativity is not empirical, and it is not a contrast between social
individualism and social collectivism. What is it, then? I suggest that we
read it as a phenomenological distinction between two distinct ways in
which social norms can appear.

.. History Made Manifest

We should first note that Heidegger’s analysis of historicity relies upon and
incorporates essential elements from the analysis of everydayness. The
Anyone provides a form of ‘common sense [Verständigkeit]’ in which
people, equipment, and work are connected (SZ, /). This is how
it co-constitutes the world. As Heidegger uses the term, historical [geschick-
lich] refers to the ‘entity that exists as being-in-the-world’, rather than any
factual, innerworldly object (SZ, /). This means that ‘Dasein’s
historicity is essentially the historicity of the world’ and that ‘what is
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
available and what is occurrent have already, in every case, been incorpo-
rated into the history of the world’ (SZ, /). If the world is the
historical phenomenon par excellence, and the Anyone co-constitutes the
world, the Anyone must itself be incorporated into historicity.
In this sense, the analysis of historicity concerns the very same topic as
the analysis of everydayness, namely, the socially inflected relational whole
of the world. Yet, Heidegger now adds that the intelligibility afforded by
the Anyone is ‘by no means ontologically transparent’ (SZ, /). The
Anyone is a historical phenomenon that obscures its own historicity. This
follows from the fact that Anyone-norms present themselves as universal
and hence as ahistorical defaults. The main difference between anonymous
social normativity and historical social normativity is then that the former
obscures the contingent nature of social norms which, however, is brought
to light by the latter. In Heidegger’s terms, this happens when we disclose
history emphatically [ausdrücklich]:
Disclosing and interpreting belong essentially to Dasein’s historizing. Out
of this kind of being of the entity which exists historically, there arises the
existentiell possibility of disclosing history emphatically and getting it in
our grasp. (SZ, /)
The thrust of the argument is that ‘authentic historicity [das eigentliche
Geschicklichkeit]’ provides the ontological transparency missing in the
‘inauthentic historicity’ of everydayness. In this context, and as I will
discuss in detail in Chapter , authentic means, primarily, that Dasein is
‘thrown back upon its factical “there”’ (SZ, /) in such a way that it
comes to understand itself and its situation in an ontologically transparent
way. This means, first, that Dasein comes to understand what is proper or
essential to its own historicity and, second, that it becomes possible for
Dasein to assume responsibility for – to commit itself differently to – the
social norms thus disclosed.
If this admittedly rough sketch of authentic historicity is correct,
historical social normativity does not provide something substantially
new. Rather, the normative content remains the same as in anonymous
social normativity but now it acquires a new modality. To borrow an
image from Carman (, ), authentic historicity is no less compatible
with the anonymous social normativity of everydayness than upward
jumping is with the downward force of gravity. A closer look at the
concepts operative in the analysis of historicity – resoluteness, heritage,
destiny, and repetition – will show the details of this relation.
Resoluteness is sometimes interpreted as a hard-headed decisionism
(e.g., Habermas , Chapter ; Levinas ). Warning us against this
 Forms of Being-With
line of interpretation, Heidegger writes that ‘[i]n the existential analysis we
cannot, in principle, discuss what Dasein factically resolves in any partic-
ular case’ (SZ, /). Instead, we must ask ‘whence, in general, Dasein
can draw those possibilities upon which it factically projects itself’
(SZ, /). Heidegger answers that since even our most intimate
familiarity with our own individuality, namely, that achieved when we
stand face to face with death, does not disclose any new possibilities of
existence, whatever is resolved upon must come from ‘one’s factical “there
[Da]”,’ which is, as we have seen, shaped by the Anyone (SZ, /f ).
So, rather than referring to a radical break with everydayness, ‘the authen-
tic existentiell understanding’ resolutely seizes upon a possibility ‘that has
come down to us [in everydayness]’ (SZ, /). In resoluteness, we
seize the possibilities of our factical ‘there’ differently: ‘The resoluteness in
which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of
authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that
resoluteness, as thrown, takes over’ (SZ, /). Dasein comes back to
itself by disclosing its current factical possibilities in terms of something
that has been handed down to it, in terms of heritage. This sheds
important new light on the social norms of our communities. Of course,
social norms are, by their very nature, ‘handed down’ to us in the sense
that their validity stems from our assumption that they are valid for others.
Yet, as we saw above, Anyone-norms obscure their own contingent nature
and appear as universal defaults. In resoluteness, on the other hand, these
social norms are handed down as handed down. We thereby come to see
our socially inflected factical possibilities as heritage rather than as defaults.
Historical social normativity brings to the table a new awareness of the
social norms that already structure our lives. This awareness is not achieved


After noting that Dasein discloses its possibilities in terms of heritage, Heidegger writes that ‘[i]n
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 [Das
entschlossene Zurückkommen auf die Geworfenheit birgt ein Sichüberliefern überkommener
Möglichkeiten in such, obzwar nicht notwendig als überkommener]’ (SZ, /). These claims are,
admittedly, difficult to reconcile, and in their translation of SZ, Macquarrie and Robinson notes that
the sentence is grammatically ambiguous. What does it mean that the possibilities handed down are
‘not necessarily [disclosed] as having thus come down’? As Katherine Ward (, ) explains, this
can mean one of two things: Either the factical possibilities are, in contrast to what I have just said,
not necessarily handed down as heritage or the process through which the possibilities are handed
down is not necessarily disclosed along with the possibilities that are disclosed as heritage. I agree
with Ward that the latter interpretation must be correct for both textual and systematic reasons.
Read in this light, the claim is that resolute Dasein is necessarily aware of what I below call the
modality of its social norms but not necessarily explicitly (or philosophically) aware of the process or
structure that enables this modal change.
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
through what Heidegger calls ‘historiology [Historie]’, that is, scientific or
quasi-scientific inquiry into the past. ‘It is not necessary that in resolute-
ness one should explicitly know the origin of the possibilities upon which
that resoluteness projects itself’ (SZ, /). Instead of being aware of
the genealogy of our social norms, Heidegger believes that we should
become aware of their modality. This happens in ‘repetition’
[Wiederholung]:
The resoluteness which comes back to itself and hands itself down, then
becomes the repetition of a possibility of existence that has come down to
us. Repeating is handing down explicitly – that is to say, going back into the
possibilities of the Dasein that has-been-there. (SZ, /)
Repetition does not mean that we somehow go back in history and ‘bring
back something that is “past”’ (SZ, /). After all, existential pro-
jections are holistically constituted and rely upon a vast network of in-
order-to’s. For example, it no longer makes sense to bring back the
possibility of being a knight or a samurai, because the social and instru-
mental networks that made these social roles possible are long gone. The
possibilities repeated and emphatically handed down must remain within
their historical or cultural milieu.
Heidegger’s point is that in repeating a historical possibility, it is no
longer a default but something that we actively choose and commit
ourselves to. Dasein ‘may choose its hero’ and thus ‘choose the choice
which makes one free for the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps
of that which can be repeated’ (SZ, /). So, instead of just following
in the footsteps of the Anyone, Dasein now chooses to follow a precedent as
a precedent or as heritage. What is repeated is a factical possibility rather
than a new possibility but in repeating it we become aware of it in a new
way, namely, as an ultimately contingent product of our historical situa-
tion. ‘By repetition, Dasein first has its own history made manifest’
(SZ, /).
Heidegger argues that this modal change provides Dasein with a more
flexible and phronetically fine-grained understanding of its world, because
Dasein, no longer committed by default to a set of socially typified
possibilities, is now free to pursue possibilities that deviate from this
taken-for-granted default. He expresses this by saying that the Anyone
only knows ‘the general situation’ [Lage], where this means that Dasein
simply assumes that it already understands the available and relevant
possibilities of a situation. In his formulation, Dasein ‘represents the
situation to itself’ prior to entering it (SZ, /), whereas the resolute
 Forms of Being-With
Dasein is ‘called forth into the situation [Situation]’ in order for it to ‘take
action’ (SZ, /). In contrast to the inflexible and highly typified
possibilities of anonymous social normativity, Dasein develops a ‘gradual
refinement of responses’ (Dreyfus , ). Although, as I have argued,
we cannot leave the Anyone behind, this lessens the ‘dictotorial hold’ that
anonymous social normativity has on us (Knowles , ).
A further consequence of this type of historical awareness is that we
become aware that our social norms are the norms of a particular commu-
nity. Heidegger formulates this point by drawing a parallel between the fate
[Schicksal] of the individual and the destiny [Geschick] of the community.
Fate is the ‘simplicity [Einfachheit]’ achieved once Dasein tears itself away
from ‘the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as
closest to one’ by seizing a single possibility that is ‘inherited and chosen at
the same time’ (SZ, /). David Carr formulates this point well:
[W]hat the individual is is thus a function of his or her place in a historical
setting. This is not a ‘straightforward’ affirmation of the sort that might be
made by a historical determinist, who calls the individual a ‘product’ of
history or the inevitable result of historical forces. Instead it is a phenom-
enological assertion about what the individual is ‘for himself.’ It means
that the individual’s self-understanding of himself passes through history.
(Carr , )
While this sounds like a heroic individualism, Heidegger goes on to argue
that since Dasein is constitutively being-with, ‘its happening [Geschehen] is
a co-happening [Mitgeschen] and is determined as destiny [Geschick]. This is
how we designate the happening of community, of the people’ (SZ, /
). The point is that in being fatefully committed to a factical possibil-
ity, say, my role as a teacher, I am not only committed to this possibility as
an atomistic possibility. Since existential projections are holistically con-
stituted, I also become co-responsible for the social and historical condi-
tions that make this possibility possible. Thus, in resoluteness, I become
aware that the possibility I choose to commit myself to depends on
contingent social and historical factors, and I commit myself to sustain
these background relations to the best of my ability. I commit myself to
the individual activity of teaching and the community or, rather, the
institution of teaching.
Some find the invocation of people and community highly suspect and
see it as a direct precursor to Heidegger’s fatal politics. Crowell, for


This suspicion is supported by Karl Löwith‘s description of his last meeting with Heidegger in which
Löwith suggested that Heidegger’s support of National Socialism stemmed from his philosophy.
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
instance, argues that Heidegger moves on ‘very shaky ground’, when he
juxtaposes fate and destiny, individual and community. Resoluteness, as
Crowell understands it, amounts to a form of self-responsibility. And
communities, he argues, lack the ontological structure required for self-
responsibility because they have ‘no first person’ (, ). This yields two
illusions: ‘first, that in choosing I am choosing for my whole community;
and second, that what I can choose must somehow be a function of that
very community’ (, ).
However, Crowell is wrong on both counts. First, Heidegger’s point is
not I can somehow choose for my whole community, as this implies that
I am in a position where I can choose for everyone else. Instead, he
suggests that I, in making my choice, am also choosing the community
itself. I commit myself to sustain the social and historical conditions for a
factical possibility. Thus, in choosing to be a good teacher, I also commit
myself to not sabotaging faculty meetings and to not selling drugs to my
students even when I am off work, as these activities would eventually
undermine the very institution that is a prerequisite for being a good
teacher. Second, Crowell believes that there is no way in which what
I choose is a function of the community, but this is equally wrong.
Although my choice depends on an irreducible form of self-responsibility,
self-responsibility is insufficient to account for the choice. Not only are the
different factical possibilities among which I choose holistically and socially
individuated qua the in-order-to relations, but, as I have argued, my
commitments themselves occasionally depend on others being similarly
committed. Being a teacher, I will eventually lose my sense of purpose if
I get the sense that my students could not care less about what
I teach them.
Furthermore, the claim that community has no first-person reveals that
Crowell understands community in a strangely reified way. In contrast, the
very point of Heidegger’s two accounts of social normativity is that
community is an integral part of the first-person perspective. As I have
argued, we see this in the way that other’s behaviour sets a precedent for
me so that I unconsciously adopt it as the standard for how anyone should
act in a similar situation. Expanding upon this basic insight, Heidegger
believes that individuals are members of groups and communities once

Heidegger reportedly confirmed this without any reservations and specified that his conception of
historicity [Geschicklichkeit] provided the foundation of his political commitment (, ).
However, it is important to note that this remark was made in  at which point, as I argue
below, Heidegger’s conception of history has changed dramatically. For this reason, Löwith’s
testimony does not by itself provide evidence against the SZ-account.
 Forms of Being-With
they understand themselves, others, and their shared environment in light
of the field of possibilities characteristic of these groups and communities.
Once conceived on the basis of pre-reflective triangulation, it becomes
clear the communities are irreducibly first personal, although first personal
plural. In Heidegger’s own words:
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. 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. (SZ, /)
So, in contrast to Crowell’s individualism, Heidegger understands I and we
as emerging from the same holistically constituted world.
As I argue in detail below, there is no necessary connection between
Heidegger’s conception of history and his political engagement.
Nevertheless, historical social normativity does modify social life in a
way that underpins and makes politics possible. Historical social norma-
tivity implies an awareness of social norms as the social norms of a
particular community. It thereby also enables us to understand our com-
munity in contrast to other communities. Historical social normativity
involves in-group/out-group discrimination. Through historical awareness,
we realise that the social norms taken for granted in everydayness are not
only contingent but ontologically fragile, that our way of making sense of
things can fail or breakdown. Therefore, the communal space of possibil-
ities requires commitment and sometimes even a kind of protection if we
are to sustain our sense-making practices. Heidegger alludes to this proto-
political aspect of historical social normativity by saying that ‘the power of
destiny becomes free in communication [Mitteilung] and struggle [Kampf]’
(SZ, /).

.. Fragility, Coherence, and Communal Commitments

While touched upon in SZ, the interrelated issues of cultural particularity,
ontological fragility, and communal commitments first take centre stage in
the politically turbulent period of the mid-‘s and early ‘s. We must be
cautious when dealing with this period of Heidegger’s thought. It is crucial
to carefully distinguish between, on the one hand, the social ontological
principles and that which follows systematically from these and, on the
other hand, how these principles are either supplemented by a political
philosophy or outright distorted to accommodate a political agenda. We
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
need, in other words, two reading strategies – one based on the principle of
charity, the other a hermeneutic of suspicion. This subsection follows the
principle of charity. The next chapter employs a hermeneutic of suspicion.
In SZ the sections on historicity start with an analysis of the individual’s
fate before adding that this cannot be separated from the destiny of the
community. In the ‘s, however, Heidegger reverses the order of presen-
tation so that the question of community appears prior to – and at times
even at the expense of – the question of the individual. Consider, for
instance, the following paragraph from one of the Hölderlin lectures,
which makes the roughly same point as SZ’s concept of repetition:
Only in such suffering can a destiny take hold of us, a destiny that never
simply lies present before us, but that is a sending [Schickung] – that is, is
sent to us [uns geschickt] – and in such a way that it sends us toward our
vocation [Bestimmung], granted that we ourselves truly send ourselves into
it, that we know what is fitting [das Schickliche], and that we knowingly
will it. (GA, /)
Like the account of repetition, it is all about aligning oneself with and
assuming responsibility for a historically conditioned factical possibility.
But in SZ it is primarily the individual who is faced with this task. Here,
however, a suffering or a receptivity takes hold of us, so that we can assume
responsibility for and commit ourselves to it. If in the earlier work
historical social normativity was, first and foremost, something that struc-
tured the life of the individual, it now becomes the lodestar for whole
communities. We face a historical task together.
This shift in emphasis explains Heidegger’s interest in Hölderlin.
Hölderlin is the ‘poet of the Germans’, who must bring ‘the Dasein of the
People to a stand’ (GA, /). The general idea is that Hölderlin’s
poetry can bring about an awareness of and a commitment to the particu-
larity of the community, of ‘who we are’ (GA, /), since this sense of us
is currently obscured by ‘the haste of the everyday and the bustle of activity’
(GA, /). This aligns, at least in part, with how Hölderlin saw his own
work. In a letter to his brother, dated  January , Hölderlin writes
Poetry, I said, does not unite people as does a game; it unites them when it is
genuine and has a genuine effect, together with all the manifold suffering and
happiness and striving and hoping and fearing, with all their opinions and
shortcomings, all their virtues and ideas, with everything great and little that is
found among them, uniting them increasingly into a living, intimate whole,
articulated in a thousand ways, for this is what poetry itself is meant to be, and
as the cause, so the effect. Is it not true, dear brother, that the Germans could
indeed use such a panacea? (Hölderlin, quoted in GA, f/f )
 Forms of Being-With
Setting aside the blatant nationalism of this project as well as the ques-
tionable social significance ascribed to poetry, three social ontological
themes figure prominently in Heidegger’s thought in the ‘s and early
‘s that will serve to deepen our understanding of his conception of
historical social normativity. These themes are () the fragile and contest-
able nature of communal life, () the normative pressure towards social
coherence, and () the significance of communal commitments.
() Communal life is fragile because although social normativity shapes
how we interpret the world it never fully determines it. Chapter  argued
this point in a discussion of Heidegger’s holism. Rather than taking
meaning to depend on social conventions, Heidegger believes that mean-
ing emerges from a pre-reflective triangulation that constantly occurs
between ourselves, others, and the world. This interrelation underpins
and makes possible social conventions, while also rendering them vulner-
able to non-conventional impulses that ultimately threaten to destabilise
the comportmental pattern characteristic of a specific community.
Heidegger develops this point further through an idiosyncratic inter-
pretation of the Greek concepts of polis and dikē. Polis is typically trans-
lated as ‘city-state’, and dikē is typically translated as ‘justice’ or ‘right’.
Heidegger, however, proposes a more radical social ontological interpreta-
tion that underlines how the world enables a historically instituted realm
of intelligibility.
Let us first consider the term polis.
One translates polis as state [Staat] and city-state [Stadtstaat]; this does not
capture the entire sense. Rather, polis is the name for the site [Stätte], the
Da, within which and as which Da-sein is historically. The polis is the site of
history, the Da, in which, out of which and for which history happens. To
this site of history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the celebrations,
the games, the poets, the thinkers, the ruler, the council of elders, the
assembly of the people, the armed forces, and the ships. (GA, /f )
The polis provides the opening, the site, in which a historical realm of
intelligibility can take place. By using the term polis as a synonym for the
Da of Dasein, Heidegger emphasises that the world is always already
infused with historical norms. The polis is the ontological ground that
makes it possible for a concrete, historical whole of relations to come into
existence – the relations between gods, temples, priests, celebrations, and
so on.
Rather than being construed as one domain (‘the historical world’)
among others (e.g., ‘the personal world’ or ‘the natural world’), historicity
influences how all entities appear. The polis is the ‘open site of that
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
destining [Schickung] from out of which all human relations towards
entities . . . are determined’ (GA, /). ‘The polis itself is . . . the
way in which the being of entities in its unconcealment and concealment
orders [verfügt] for itself a “where” in which the history of humanity is
gathered’ (GA, /). At first glance, this sounds as if Heidegger
proposes a radical social constructivism according to which our history
fully determines our sense of what there is. But this is only apparent. In the
same way that being-with gives rise to but is not exhausted by a specific set
of social norms, polis gives rise to but is not exhausted by dikē. ‘The polis is
the site of dikē’, as Withy notes. The latter is ‘“how things hang together”:
a world as a set of meaningful relations’ (, ). Alternatively, polis is
roughly equivalent to the existential–ontological sense of the shared world;
dikē names a particular regime of historical normativity and is therefore
roughly equivalent to the existential–ontic sense of a shared world.
Heidegger translates dikē with (historical) order [Fug]: ‘The polis is the
essential abode [Wesenstätte] of historical man . . ., the “where” from which
alone order [Fug] is ordained [zugefügt] to him and in which he is ordered
[gefügt]’ (GA, /). The polis makes a certain social and historical
order possible, and it does so by drawing a line between that which aligns
with the social order and that which conflicts with it. From the polis
‘springs forth whatever is granted stead [gestättet] and whatever is not,
what is order [Fug] and what is disorder [Unfug], what is fitting [das
Schicklicke] and what is unfitting [das Ungeschicklicke]’ (GA, /).
We might say, then, that dikē names the normative content of the polis.
Since many historical orders are possible, dikē is inherently contingent
and fragile. This fragility emerges most clearly when a historical social
order is under pressure, for example, if it is contested by a group belonging
to another historical order. Imagine for instance a religious community
called the Faithful. The Faithful consider a specific entity, the Symbol, to
be a gift from the gods and use the Symbol in several important rituals.
Imagine, now, that a group called the Historians decides to study the
Faithful and their history. The Historians happen to get their hands on the
Symbol, which they consider to be a historical artefact belonging in a
museum. The Historians’ way of interacting with the Symbol – how they
study it, how they store it, and so on – strikes the Faithful as an
abomination, as an insult to their very form of life. For each group, the
world has a certain order, and for each group, the other group is out of
order. For each group, the other group fails to do justice to what things are.
In such interpretative conflicts, we face the limits of our own historically
conditioned space of intelligibility by being confronted with another way
 Forms of Being-With
of making sense of things. On Heidegger’s account, interpretative conflicts
are not incidental products of, say, a ‘clash of civilisations’. Rather, they are
another aspect of the in-group/out-group discrimination essential to his-
torical social normativity. Indeed, the possibility of interpretative conflicts
is already implied by the claim, argued for in Chapter , that we share and
divide ourselves in the unconcealment of entities, that is, that whenever
Dasein intends an entity, it is also aware that this same entity is (poten-
tially) given to others with practically incompatible understandings
of being.
As fragile, any understanding of being is contestable. Heidegger formu-
lates this point with reference to Heraclitus’ concept of battle [polemos].
He writes
Battle is the power that generates entities, yet not in such a way that, once
things have come to be by way of it, battle then withdraws from them.
Rather, battle also and precisely preserves and governs [verwaltet] entities in
their essence [Wesenbestand]. Battle is indeed generator, yet also ruler.
(GA, /)
Interpretative conflicts ‘generates entities’ in the sense that a specific
understanding of being is always wrestled from a multitude of other
potential disclosures of being. And in a certain sense, interpretative con-
flicts never cease. If our sense-making practices are underpinned by an
open-ended responsiveness to others, our communal way of seeing things
must be continuously reinforced – the comportmental pattern must be
constantly redrawn – lest we will unconsciously mimic another way of
comporting ourselves towards the world and hence, over time, uncon-
sciously adopt another comportmental precedent as our default. If we
imagine that one of the Faithful came to live amongst the Historians, his
previous way of life would be disrupted. At some point, he might even
come to see the Symbol as a historical artefact rather than a sacred object.
At the very least, he would have to adopt two different and practically
incompatible interpretative standpoints – on the one hand, the Symbol is a
historical artefact, and, on the other hand, it is a sacred object – and endure
the psychological strain caused by this conflict.
Historical social normativity comes with a non-thematic awareness of
such interpretative conflicts. Heidegger claims that dikē (here translated as
‘right’) essentially is battle or strife:
Dikē eris – right [Recht] is strife. According to common understanding,
right is something inscribed independently somewhere, and with its aid and
through its application strife is precisely decided and eliminated. No!
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
Originarily and in keeping with its essence, right first emerges as such in
strife; in strife it forms itself, proves itself, and becomes true. It is strife that
establishes the sides, and one side is what it is only through the other, in
reciprocal self-recognition. (GA, /)
Rejecting the ordinary conception of order and right as a written agree-
ment that puts an end to disagreement, Heidegger claims that battle
understood as interpretative conflict is essential to any historical order.
A historical order always comes with two sides – the right and the wrong,
the appropriate and the inappropriate, the true and the false. These remain
in a constant tension; they are what they are only in ‘reciprocal self-
recognition’. Gregory Fried (, ) rightly notes that this passage
sounds almost Hegelian. Yet, reciprocal self-recognition does not mean
here, as it does in Hegel, that two ontic social groups must recognise each
other in terms of their particular identities. For Heidegger, the two sides
are concealment and unconcealment as such, the very fact that one
disclosure of being rules out other disclosures of being. As Fried puts it,
‘rather than establishing some absolute intelligbility, the polis must hold
open for Dasein the possibility of confrontation and dissolution in the
understanding of its world’ (Fried , ). In terms of historicity, this
means that historical social norms are what they are only in opposition to
other possible historical social norms. For this reason, historical social
normativity is, as he says, necessarily two-sided (GA, /), whereas,
we might add, anonymous social normativity is one-sided in taking itself to
be a universal default.
() When using the German word Fug to translate dikē, Heidegger
underlines the normative pressure towards social coherence characteristic
of Dasein. Fug is a term difficult to render into English, and it is used
only sparingly in German. It appears most frequently in its antonym,
Unfug, which is used to indicate either that something does not make
sense or that someone has done something inappropriate (as in the
expression Es ist ein Unfug. . .). Fug itself is mostly used in the expression
mit Fug und Recht, which means that something or someone is justified
in doing something. A similar meaning is found in the word for authority
or authorisation, Befugnis. The verb fügen, however, simply means
to join something, and the noun Gefüge means a gathering of jointures
in a structure or a framework. Finally, Fügung means providence or,
more generally, fortunate circumstances; eine glückliche Fügung might
refer to the lucky circumstances that have brought a group of
people together.
 Forms of Being-With
This complex semantic network lurks behind Heidegger’s translation
dikē as order [Fug]:
Here we understand order first as joint [Fuge] and structure [Gefüge],
then as ordinance [Fügung], as the way in which the overwhelming
gives its orders [Walten]; finally, as the enjoining structure [fügende
Gefüge] that demands integration [Einfügen] and compliance [Sichfügen].
(GA, /)
The passage describes Fug () as a jointure or connection between things
that fit together [Fuge] and a structure or, literally, a gathering of such
connections [Gefüge], that is, as a relational whole; () as an arrangement
of things that is not up to us as individuals but which is preordained by an
overwhelming power, as something that determines our lives but is beyond
our control; and () as the way in which this structure or order enforces
coherence so that each individual must integrate themselves and comply
with the given order.
Needless to say, these different meanings are impossible to capture
elegantly in English. In their translation of GA, Fried and Richard
Polt translate Fug with fittingness, while Andre Schuwer and Richard
Rojcewics use order in their translation of GA. Fittingness resonates well
with the emphasis on jointure and relationality in () and conveys some of
the need to fit in central to (). Nonetheless, I prefer order since it can
mean () a structure; () something that is in effect and whose authority
lies elsewhere as when something is preordained; and finally, () something
that requires or demands something from an agent or a group of agents.
Human beings find themselves thrown into a historical order – a certain
way of making sense of things seems preordained – because they, through
their socialisation, develop a socially inflected comportmental pattern. This
comportmental pattern is a product of our social interactions, and due to
the generic drift towards social norms, it will largely cohere with the
comportmental patterns of those with whom we usually interact.
A historical order is, therefore, a socially inflected structure of saliences
in accordance with which we understand the world. Dikē provides a
background condition – a relational whole – that allows entities to be
meaningful for a group of people in roughly similar ways. To use
Heidegger’s own example, an order might consist of non-thematic rela-
tions between the priests, the temples, the poets, the rulers, and so one. If
one is to understand the priests as the specific type of priests that they are,
one must necessarily have a tacit understanding of their relations to all
these other entities. For this reason, ‘The Origin of the Artwork’ argues
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
that the Greek temple does not stand in a : representational relation to
anything but is rather a gathering of relations:
It simply stands there in the middle of the rocky, fissured valley. The
building encloses the figure of a god and within this concealment, allows
it to stand forth through the columned hall within the holy realm. Through
the temple, the god is present in the temple. . . . It is the temple work that
first structures [fügt] and simultaneously gathers [sammelt] around itself the
unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and
blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire for the human
being the shape of its destiny [Geschickes]. The all-governing expanse of
these open relations is the world of this historical people.
The temple is what and how it is only in relation to the god and to the
people that it gathers around itself. Similarly, a sacrifice to the gods is only
meaningful on the basis of an entire non-thematic and taken-for-granted
social structure. The time and place must be right, the right people must
be present, the right tools must be used, and so on. The historical order
provides the conditions of intelligibility of the sacrifice.
Why does such an order ‘demand integration and compliance’? We have
already seen that for a triangulating and temporal creature like Dasein a
precedent will become a standard of salience. This answer is, however,
formulated in descriptive terms, so where does the normative force of a
historical order come from? Heidegger answers that Dasein is always already
normatively engaged in its way of living because Dasein, by its very nature,
has to be its factical possibilities (SZ, /, /; GA, /) and
because it ‘in its being has this very being as an issue’ (SZ, /). In purely
descriptive terms, we might say that the concrete possibilities of a world
disclosure are co-determined by a historical order. It is clear that this has a
normative dimension, once we see these possibilities from the perspective of
Dasein itself: Dasein has to be – and therefore always already finds itself
normatively invested in – one or several of these possibilities.
While it is a logical possibility that an individual can wrest itself from
socially instituted possibilities, there’s a heavy price for doing so since
Dasein’s sense of self is bound up with the saliences inherent to a social
and physical environment. In addition, there is always the risk of – the
generic drift towards – renewed social coherence, so that the way of life
that at first seems an exceptional departure from one set of social norms
turns out to be just as conform. ‘[W]e shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as
anyone shrinks back’, indeed (SZ, f/).
() At times the fragile and contestable nature of historical social
normativity requires us to assume responsibility for and protect our
 Forms of Being-With
community. On a personal level, Heidegger took this idea to imply
authoritarianism and nationalism, but it does not necessarily entail a
reactionary politics. All communities – political and non-political, author-
itarian or egalitarian, mono- or multicultural – are occasionally in need of
protection and occasionally require that their members assume a specific
kind of responsibility lest the community disintegrates. Etymologically,
community is a gathering together [cum-] that implies duties or obligations
[munus]. This, of course, poses the question: How does one assume
responsibility for a historical order? This involves what I’ll call communal
commitments.
In the analysis of shared action in Chapter , we saw that the term joint
commitment refers to how an individual agent is committed to an activity in a
way that constitutively depends on one or several other agents being similarly
committed to the activity. In the previous discussion, I focused on small groups
and temporary activities. In order to understand the nature of historical social
normativity, however, we need to spell out a sub-type of joint commitment:
communal commitments. A communal commitment is characterised by two
further requirements – one concerning the nature of the activity, the other
concerning the composition of the group. First, communal commitments
require that the activity in question is a set of actions and interactions that
constitute a temporally prolonged equilibrium. Let us call this the endurance
requirement. This specifies that the activity in question must constitute a
relatively stable relational whole, that is, a set of social norms equivalent to what
Heidegger calls a historical order. Second, communal commitments require that
the group of agents committed to the activity consists of both past, present, and
future agents. Let us call this the intergenerationality requirement. This specifies
that the group in question must be a historical or intergenerational group in the
sense that a communally committed agent commits him- or herself to an activity
under the assumption that certain agents in the past have been similarly
committed, that certain agents in the present are similarly committed, and,
finally, that certain agents in the future will be similarly committed.
Although he lacks the technical terminology, Heidegger frequently
invokes such a temporal nexus when discussing historical social
normativity:
History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task [Aufgegebenes]
as the entry into its endowment [Mitgegebenes]. (GA, /)
Community is through each individual’s being committed in advance to
something that binds and determines every individual in exceeding them.
(GA, /)
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
We understand our purpose [Bestimmung] as that for which we determine
ourselves [bestimmen], that which we make for ourselves our task [Auftrag].
This task of our being is our purpose – not posited arbitrarily, but our
purpose, our task, our future in the sense that the task is predetermined
from our mission [Sendung] . . . As our mission, the task is our purpose in
the original sense: [It] is the power [Macht] of time itself, in which we
stand, that empowers [ermächtigt] us to our future, it bequeaths to us the
legacy of our origin. (GA, /)
At one point, Heidegger even claims that time, in its three dimensions,
constitutes the ‘source of the historical people’ (GA, /; GAA,
) in much the same way that temporality is the meaning of care. When
elevated to the collective level, the three temporal horizons indicate that a
group of agents in the present pursue a possibility that has been handed
down to them, qua heritage and destiny, from a past group of agents and
that they do so in a way that aims at them passing this possibility on to
future generations, qua historical mission and task. To be communally
committed is to commit oneself to an activity in a way that depends on
one understanding oneself as part of a similarly committed
intergenerational community.
According to the intergenerationality requirement, some of our com-
mitments will fail if we anticipate that futural agents will not commit
themselves to the activity in question. As an example, consider the disil-
lusioned Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last
Jedi. Skywalker has retreated into self-isolation on a solitary island and cut
himself off from the Force because his apprentices, who were destined to
continue the Jedi Order, were killed. For Skywalker, his commitment to
the Jedi Order is conditioned by there being futural agents – apprentices
and apprentices’ apprentices and so on – who are equally committed to the
Jedi Order. When he loses his trust in the continuation of the community,
it becomes impossible for him to be a Jedi. This changes once he meets
Rey, who wants to become a Jedi herself and re-establish the Jedi Order.
The example shows that certain possibilities lose their significance if our
communal commitments fail, for example, if we sense that our community
has no future. As a loss of meaning, we might also consider this a
historically pertinent and localised version of Heideggerian anxiety, that
is, a historically conditioned breakdown of communal significance.


In a similar vein, Samuel Scheffler‘s Death and the Afterlife describes what we might characterise as a
breakdown of a global communal commitments. He argues that in a world where – due to, say,
general infertility – the currently living human beings would be the last, ‘people would lose
confidence in the value of many sorts of activities, would cease to see reason to engage in many
 Forms of Being-With
Returning to the eerie example from Section ., we now see that when
he connects the we of the lecture hall to the we of the people by appealing
to the patriotism of his students, Heidegger tries to instil a communal
commitment in them. I will show this in more detail in the next chapter,
where I examine Heidegger’s political philosophy by asking which com-
munal commitments he considers worthwhile, why he does so, and how he
hopes to sustain these.

. Is Community Necessary?

At the outset of Section ., I noted that there might be an opposition
between historical social normativity and anonymous social normativity
like that between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. I argued that despite
appearances this was not the case. The difference between these two types
of social normativity does not concern which norms we are committed to
but only how we are thus committed. Anonymous social normativity
provides a set of norms in the form of a relatively stable, socially inflected
comportmental pattern, which we assume to be a universal default.
Anonymous social normativity thereby obscures its own historical and
contingent nature.
Historical social normativity, on the other hand, modifies this comport-
mental pattern by making its historicity manifest. In other words, histor-
ical social normativity implies that social norms are disclosed as historical
and hence as fragile and contestable. It is characterised by an awareness
that social norms are continuously involved in interpretative conflicts, that
our social norms are in constant tension with other social norms. This
awareness leads to the proto-political possibility of communal commit-
ments, in which we, as a historical and intergenerational community,
commit ourselves to sustain our social norms.
Formulated differently, social normativity consists of an equilibrium of
in-order-to’s and for-the-sake-of’s, and it can appear in two ways. Either
we commit ourselves to this normative whole by default as in the Anyone
or we commit ourselves to this normative whole as a community. In
communal commitments, I commit myself to the prolonged activity of a
historical order under the assumption that other historical agents are
similarly committed.

familiar sorts of pursuits, and would become emotionally detached from many of those activities
and pursuits’ (, ).
 Two Types of Social Normativity 
Heidegger’s discussion of social normativity is complicated by the fact
that he fails to distinguish between community understood as an existen-
tial condition and community understood as an existentiell ideal. My
discussion makes clear that authentic historicity is an existentiell possibility
(SZ, /) that derives its content from anonymous social normativity.
Anonymous social normativity is thereby existential because the Anyone in
the form of a generic drift towards stabilised social norms is an unavoidable
feature of social life. As these norms spring from the unconscious processes
of distantiality, averageness, and levelling down, they are initially ontolog-
ically obscure to the individual. Historical social normativity is an ideal in
which we are aware of this dimension of our own being. This is required if
we are to assume responsibility for our communities. However, as
Heidegger realised during his brief appearance on the political scene, such
awareness is a difficult seed to plant in the minds of others.
  
Politics and Authenticity
  

Heidegger’s Politics

Communal commitments are arguably central to political philosophy.

Perhaps political philosophy just is a normative inquiry into communal
commitments: Which communal commitments should we have? Why?
How should we sustain them? We can, for instance, summarise John
Rawls’ conception of justice as proposing () that we should be commu-
nally committed to an equilibrium of interaction in which all individuals
have an equal claim to basic liberties, in which social and political positions
are effectively open to all individuals regardless of their social background,
ethnicity, or sex, and in which inequalities are to the greatest benefit of
those worst-off. Rawls argues () that we should all hold this set of
communal commitments because these are the terms of cooperation that
free and equal citizens would agree to in the original position. Finally, he
believes () that political institutions must enforce these communal com-
mitments and make sure that other communal commitments – for exam-
ple, those stemming from a particular religious background – are
compatible with them.
Only a fool would suggest that Heidegger’s political philosophy is
anywhere near as sophisticated as Rawls’, but this chapter shows that it
yields itself to the same kind of analysis. In Section ., I detail which
communal commitments Heidegger believes we should hold and how he
imagines that these commitments will be sustained. In a nutshell, he
advocates, in the ‘s and ‘s, a philosophically infused nationalism,
and he considered the state and the educational system to be instrumental
in establishing it. By most measures, Heidegger’s account of which com-
munal commitments we should hold and how these should be sustained is
rather flat-footed. His answer to why we should hold exactly these com-
munal commitments is, however, more interesting. Thus, in Section .,
I show that Heidegger attempts to philosophically justify his nationalism
by reference to the alleged exceptional position of the Germans in the
history of being. I show that Heidegger in this period considered the

 Politics and Authenticity
communal commitments of the German people essential to his envisaged
revolution of philosophy and that he, correspondingly, took the commu-
nal commitments of other peoples to be philosophically reactionary coun-
terforces. In Section ., I show that this opposition underlies Heidegger’s
antisemitic juxtaposition of the Germans and the Jews. Finally, in Section
., I argue that the attempted philosophical justification of nationalism is
marred not only by political misconceptions but also fuelled by a series of
social ontological errors that flies in the face of Heidegger’ own
best insights.

. Community, State, and Education

In , Heidegger paints the following grim picture of his times:
This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own
throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and
America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both
the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the
rootless organisation of the average man. . . .
We lie in the pincers. Our people, as standing in the centre, suffers the most
intense pressure – our people, the people richest in neighbours and hence
the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical people. We
are sure of this vocation [Bestimmung]; but this people will gain a fate
[Schicksal] from its vocation only when it creates in itself a resonance, a
possibility of resonance for this vocation, and grasps its tradition
[Überlieferung] creatively. All this implies that this people, as a historical
people, must transpose itself – and with it the history of the West – from
the centre of their future happening into the originary realm of the powers
of being. (GA, f/f )
This is a rather precise summary of the general motif of Heidegger’s
political philosophy that combines, on the one hand, the ideas of tradition,
fate, and vocation that we have already encountered in the analysis of
historical social normativity and, on the other hand, the narrative of the
history of being according to which unthinking mechanisation charac-
terises Western culture (what Heidegger calls ‘machination’ [Machenschaft]
and later ‘en-framing’ [Gestell]) in a way that can only be remedied by
the Germans.
The idea is that America and Russia are ‘metaphysically seen’ the same
because they both embody a particular understanding of being according
to which entities, to borrow a term from ‘The Question Concerning
Technology’, are disclosed as a ‘standing reserve’ (GA, /). Crudely
 Heidegger’s Politics 
put, Americans and Russians disclose entities as ready for exploitation. If
allowed to reign unchecked, this understanding of being will, according to
Heidegger, lead to two interrelated processes: the destruction of the earth
and the deterioration of philosophy. This is so because America and Russia
both represent a thoughtlessness that does not or cannot pose the question
of being and hence does not or cannot realise that things could be disclosed
differently than as a standing reserve.
Only Germany – and German philosophy, in particular – can counter
this ‘spiritual decline’ (GA, /) because the Germans supposedly
have a linguistic and historical–philosophical connection to the Greeks
that allows them to incept ‘another beginning’ (e.g., GA, /). The
Germans can short-circuit the spiritual decline and institute a new and
more thoughtful understanding of being. ‘Only the Germans can in an
originarily new way poetise and say being – they alone will conquer anew
the essence of theoria and finally create logic’ (GA, /). This can only
be done, to repeat the central thesis of the Hölderlin lectures, if the
Germans grasp their own being – ‘the properly national [das eigentlich
Nationalle]’ – by venturing through the Greeks (e.g., GA, /;
GA, /).
This image makes clear that Heidegger’s political philosophy is
geopolitically motivated. As Derrida noted, Heidegger fears a ‘spiritual
decadence’ in which the phenomenon of the ‘world’ is obscured (,
f ), and in the ‘s, this concern gets expressed in the form of a
‘[g]eopolitics [that] is none other than a Weltpolitik of spirit’ (, ).
Heidegger senses, in other words, that the German form of life is threat-
ened by the form of life that he finds common to both USA and USSR.
For this reason, he speaks in favour of a communal commitment to the
cultural and philosophical particularity of Germany. This is a communal
commitment because Heidegger sees it as originating from the German
philosophical tradition, especially Hölderlin and German Idealism, and as
flowing towards future generations, towards ‘the futural ones’
[Die Zu-künftigen], who must pick up what is thus handed-down to them
(e.g., GA, /).
As hinted, this self-aggrandisement of the German people and the
corresponding disdain for all other peoples are motivated by a specific


I will not attempt to reconstruct why Heidegger thought that there was a special connection between
the Germans and the Greeks but this assumption is not uncommon in German intellectual history.
See Schmidt () and Heller ().
 
See also Bambach (), Kisiel (), and Knudsen (). See Sikka ().
 Politics and Authenticity
conception of the history of being, and I will return to this in the next
section. First, however, we must see how Heidegger in the ‘s imagines
that his fellow Germans will come to share his commitment to a philo-
sophically infused nationalism.
If Heidegger’s commitment to nationalism seems rather trivial, so will
his ideas of how to sustain this communal commitment. He appeals, first
and foremost, to two institutions – the state and the educational system.
As he sees it, these are instrumental in establishing the prolonged and
large-scale we of the German people. This is particularly evident in the
politically charged speeches that he held as rector of Freiburg University in
the period from April  to April  and in his lecture courses from
 to  that centres around the themes of history, people, and state
(NHS, GA, GAA, GA, GA). In these texts, Heidegger not only
tries to instil nationalism in his students but also offers a philosophical,
although fragmentary, analysis of the National Socialist state.
For Heidegger, the state is not simply a governing body that sovereignly
posits laws (as in the rule of power) nor is at a governing body that
exercises power while being constrained by the law or constitution (as in
the rule of law). In his characteristic way, Heidegger dismisses these
conceptions of the state as ontic quarrels that must be bracketed in favour
of an ontological interpretation. He formulates the point in a variety of
ways but the general direction of the argument is clear: The state is
not simply an ontic institution but ‘the historical being of the people’
(GA, /; cf. GAA, ; GA, /, /; NHS, ).
The similarity to the analytic of Dasein is obvious; we must examine not
entities but their being. But what exactly does Heidegger mean when
suggesting that the state is the historical being of the people? Drawing
on Hegel’s understanding of the state as spirit, Heidegger contends that
the state is the ‘self-becoming’ or the ‘self-consciousness’ of the historical
Dasein of a people (e.g., GA, /, /). Hegel understands this
in terms of the objectification of freedom, while Heidegger, in contrast,
cashes out this idea in terms of finite existence: The state becomes a name
for the ‘care of the people (not ‘for’ the people)’ (GA, /). The care
is not ‘for’ the people because the state is not an external governing body
that takes care of the interests of the people. Rather, it is a care of the
people in the dual sense that the people is both subject and object of care.
The state is not something distinct from the people, not something that
governs on its behalf. It is, rather, the people’s care for itself. It is a form of
‘self-willing’ (GA, /). Heidegger’s notion of ‘the state’ thus aligns
with his conception of communal commitments; the state is the way in
 Heidegger’s Politics 
which a community gives shape to its own existence and cares about
its own endurance. In his terms, the state is that ‘by virtue of whose decree
the people first secures for itself historical duration, that is, the preservation
of their mission and the struggle over its mandate’ (GA, /;
GAA, ). The state is, it seems, the people’s way of being at issue
for itself.
Which exact ontic shape this communal care takes depends on the
community in question: ‘[C]onstitution and law are the actualisation of
our decision for the state – they are factical attestations of what we take to
be our historical task as a people, the task that we are trying to live out’
(NHS, ). In other words, the state is the community’s attempt to give
itself an enduring form, to provide itself with a temporally prolonged
equilibrium. As the exact form of this equilibrium depends on the partic-
ular community, Heidegger emphasises that his analysis of the state in no
way amounts to a general legal theory: ‘[O]ne cannot establish a theory of
the state that is not already built upon particular ties to the being of a
people’ (NHS, ).
Heidegger believes that the historical task of the Germans is incompat-
ible with the idea of civil liberties and constitutional democracy. In line
with his times, he explicitly endorses the authoritarian Führerprinzip
according to which the Führer or leader has the sole authority over all
governmental structures. In Heidegger’s words, the leader ‘thinks much
and wills knowingly – what the people want, who indeed do not know
what they want, but precisely in the leader come to themselves’
(GA, /). Paradoxically, the state is the care of the people for
itself, and yet, it is the state, embodied by the leader, that first unifies the
people: ‘The will of the leader first transforms the others into a following,
and from the following arises a community’ (NHS, ).
Heidegger never offers any argument for this authoritarianism, but it is
an intrinsic part of his politics. He simply assumes that the leader has an
extraordinary insight into the historical task of the people. Accordingly, the
leader assigns everyone else a specific role that they must fulfil in pursuit of
this task. ‘“State” . . . should consist in the “fact” that one commands and
the others obey!’ (GA, /). The state provides the people with ‘an
order in the sense of mastery, rank, leadership, and following’ (NHS, ).
In other words, the leader provides the institutional hierarchy necessary to
sustain and enforce the cultural particularity of the German people. In
contrast, people without state and without homeland – like ‘the Semitic
nomads’ – ‘are in constant danger of losing their peoplehood and perish-
ing’ (NHS, f ).
 Politics and Authenticity
In line with my analysis of shared action and social normativity,
Heidegger’s account of communal commitments involves both a teleolog-
ical and a normative element. It involves ‘both an understanding of [] the
goal and engagement – that is, a leap into the accomplishment of the
goal – along with [] persistence, which makes the engaged person
develop’ (NHS, , numbers added). Mere authoritarianism is more or
less sufficient to ensure [] the teleology, that is, that all citizens obey and
do their part. But for Heidegger, the citizens must also be [] committed to
the task: ‘The true implementation of the will is not based on coercion,
but on awakening the same will in another’ (NHS, ). The citizens must
align their wills with the will of the leader; they must share his commit-
ment to the order of the state.
The important task of ensuring this commitment befalls the educational
system. Indeed, as the notebook entries, speeches, and manuscripts pro-
duced during and slightly after he was rector shows, Heidegger sees
education as a way of tying students to the state. He writes, for instance:
‘Education [Erziehung] – [is] the effective and binding realisation of the
power of the state as the will of the people to itself’ (GA, /).
Similarly, in the semester after having stepped down as rector, he notes in a
lecture manuscript:
‘Political education’! All education is ‘political’ – i.e. co-grounding and
developing and retaining the Dasein of the state. The people is brought
up into the state and only through this does it become the people. Whereby
the state is not something ‘outside’ of the ‘people’. (GA, /)
This idea is also the background for Heidegger’s infamous Rectorship
Address. Here, Heidegger points out that his acceptance of the rectorship
reveals a ‘commitment to the spiritual leadership of the university’
(GA, /). In accordance with the Führerprinzip, such leadership
must direct and awaken the will of the followers – the faculty and the
students (GA, /). This requires a ‘clarity, rank, and power’ that is
only attained when the leaders are ‘themselves led by the inexorability of
that spiritual mission which impresses onto the fate of the German people
the stamp of their history’ (GA, /).
In assuming the Rectorship, Heidegger anticipated a ‘revolution within
the university’ (GA, /) similar to the authoritarian revolution that
had just taken place within the state. However, in Heidegger’s self-
understanding, this revolution is not simply a grasp for power, and his
assumption of the rectorship is not, as has been suggested, an instance of
personal opportunism (e.g., Bourdieu , ). Rather, in line with his
 Heidegger’s Politics 
understanding of the cultural and philosophical particularity of the
German people, his professed aim is to elevate the German people to
the philosophical height of ‘the questionableness of being in general’
(GA, /). In James Phillips’ () excellent phrase, Heidegger is
driven by an ‘ontological opportunism’. He believes that the rectorship
provides an opportunity for his metaphysical revolution to gain traction.
Before showing how he attempts to justify his politics with reference to
the history of being, let me briefly summarise the understanding of
communal commitments operative in Heidegger’s politics by contrasting
it to the types of we analysed in the previous chapter. The Anyone
designates a community-wide social normativity that coordinates comport-
ments by offering a pattern of interlinked in-order-to’s and for-the-sake-
of’s. There is, however, no joint commitment in this type of social
normativity, and the community members are not aware of the norms
that they follow as norms. There is a we, a communal practice, that guides
the comportment of each individual, but this we is not phenomenally
transparent.
In historical social normativity, the individuals are aware of the com-
munal and fragile nature of their social norms and that these are, poten-
tially, threatened by other social norms. This makes the individuals capable
of communally committing to their social norms in such a way that they
not only follow the trajectories outline by anonymous in-order-to’s but
also commit to these in a way that depends on other community-members
(past, present, and future) being similarly committed.
Communal commitments occasionally require that we assume respon-
sibility for the social norms that structure our communal life. This is what
Heidegger, variously, calls a ‘self-affirmation’, a ‘self-willing’, or ‘the care of
the people’. In Heidegger’s ontological analysis, the state simply is the
community’s care for itself. Depending on the specific normative content
of the communal commitment, the state can take many forms (e.g., liberal
or socialist, constitutional or authoritarian) but the general idea is that the
community’s care for itself causes it to establish certain ontic institutions
whose aim is to ensure, enforce, and maintain its own unification over
time and against the external forces threatening to disrupt its unity.

. Metapolitics and the History of Being

It is correct, as reported by Löwith (), that Heidegger’s politics in
some ways builds upon his conception of historicity. But it is too simple to
merely suggest that Heidegger’s conception of historicity and his politics
 Politics and Authenticity
are two sides of the same coin. As my allusion to Rawls suggests, there is no
necessary connection between communal commitments and authoritari-
anism. It is, undoubtedly, possible to assume responsibility for one’s
community – attempt to maintain a specific equilibrium of interaction –
without becoming a fascist. Moreover, Heidegger attempts to justify his
political commitment with reference to his conception of the history of
being, which differs considerably from the SZ-account of historicity.
When it comes to the relation between Heidegger’s Nazism and his
philosophy, some argue that ‘Heidegger’s involvement with Nationalism
Socialism . . . [is] rooted in the innermost tendencies of his thought’
(Wolin , ) and that we should reject the entirety of his philosophy
on this basis (Faye ). Others believe that Heidegger’s political remarks
are systematically and philosophically irrelevant (von Herrmann and Alfieri
). Apart from these unconvincing extremes, the publication of the
Black Notebooks has generated something akin to a scholarly agreement
that Heidegger’s political stance and his antisemitism in particular are tied
to his account of the history of being (e.g., Di Cesare ; Nancy ;
Trawny ).
I agree with this general claim, but the notion of a ‘history of being’ is
highly ambiguous, and any serious analysis of Heidegger’s politics must
take this into account. Following Sheehan (, , ff ), we can
distinguish between at least five different versions this idea:
HoB  The history of being is a historical account of what various
philosophers mean with the word ‘being’.
HoB  The history of being is the idea that these philosophers failed to
recognise how the correlation between human and world makes
being and meaning possible.
HoB  The history of being is the idea that each historical age is
characterised by a particular understanding of being (a “sending
of being [Schickung des Seins]” [e.g., GA, /]) in terms of


On this point, I agree with Rorty‘s (, –) conjecture that it would not have affected
Heidegger’s philosophy if he had lived a politically innocent life. See also Hans Ruin’s ()
argument that Heidegger’s idea of destiny is progressive and conservative at the same time.

Rorty emphasises this aspect of the history of being when claiming that ‘the only thing which links
[Heidegger] with the tradition is his claim that the tradition, though persistently sidetracked onto
beings, was really concerned with Being all the time – and, indeed, constituted the history of being’
(, ).

See Okrent‘s reply to Rorty: ‘The actual content that Heidegger gives to his history of Being is both
discovered through and different from the actual content of the history of philosophy. It is
discovered through the tradition in that it traces what is forgotten by but necessary for each
specific moment in the history of philosophy’ (, ).
 Heidegger’s Politics 
which entities make sense and that it is impossible to arrive at an
ahistorical and foundational description of being [Seyn].
HoB  The history of being is a narrative about a decline in Western
culture that culminates in the nihilism of the modern techno-
logical age.
HoB  The history of being is the claim that an awareness of the human
being’s situatedness within this historical structure will remedy
(part of ) this nihilism.
For Heidegger, these ideas are woven together in roughly the following
way: (HoB ) The historical account of what philosophers mean when they
say ‘being’ enables us to elucidate (HoB ) the transcendental correlation
between human and world that they have systematically overlooked.
Assuming that philosophers have ‘played a privileged role in opening up
for their culture the possibilities given by the prevailing understanding of
being’ (Wrathall , ), this history of metaphysics reveals (HoB )
the understanding of being characteristic of different historical epochs.
This leads to (HoB ) a narrative of steady decline starting with the ancient
Greeks and culminating in modern technology. If, however, (HoB ) we
were to realise HoB -, we would be able to remedy this decline and
inaugurate a new beginning for Western philosophy and (hence) Western
civilisation at large.
This cursory overview shows the insufficiency of claiming that
Heidegger’s politics and antisemitism are ‘being-historical’, as Trawny

This is what Wrathall calls ‘the universal and total grounds thesis’: ‘Within each historical
(metaphysical) age, there is a particular understanding of being in terms of which entities show
up and make sense. This understanding of being is universal, meaning it determines every entity as
such. It is also total, meaning it also governs every way that entities can relate to and interact with
each other’ (, ).

In Iain Thomson‘s summary: ‘Before Nietzsche, the metaphysical tradition had refused to give up
the foundationalist project of securely “grounding” beings in an ontotheological Being of beings,
despite the fact that its own history, as an unbroken succession of epochal overturnings (in which
each metaphysically grounded epoch rose from the ashes of the metaphysics which preceded it),
shows that time and again metaphysics has proven incapable of providing itself with the
unimpeachable ontotheological foundation it sought. Ironically, the epoch of the metaphysical
tradition which Nietzsche himself inaugurates now effectively deprives itself, and thus us, of any
ground whatsoever. The groundless Nietzschean metaphysics of eternally recurring will-to-power
pre-conceptualizes “the totality of beings as such” as concatenations of energy in the service of
human will’ (, ).

Guignon expresses the idea in the following way: ‘[W]e have reached a moment in which the
history of the West is up for decision: either the future will bring nothing but an endless dark night
of minor variations on this “metaphysics to end all metaphysics”, as the ever-greater presence of
machination and giganticism dominating the world seems to foretell, or it may happen that the
“future ones”, the ones who might yet respond in the appropriate way to the call of be-ing, will
open up a site in which entities can show up in their question-worthiness’ (, ).
 Politics and Authenticity
() and Di Cesare () have recently suggested. How exactly does
Heidegger use these elements to justify his politics? And which, if any, can
be salvaged?
Let me lay my cards on the table. Although they might offer a novel
approach to the history of philosophy, I doubt that HoB  and HoB  are
fine-grained enough to yield convincing phenomenological analyses.
I accept a moderate version of HoB , the claim that historical and social
conditions shape how we disclose entities, but not the stronger claim that
historical epochs fully determine how things are meaningful for the same
reasons that I reject the strong version of social externalism in favour of
weak or open-ended externalism. Further, I have yet to hear a convincing
argument in support of the assumption that philosophers play a ‘privileged
role’ in opening an understanding of being. These issues aside, however,
the real problem – the smoking gun, if you will – is how Heidegger in the
‘s and early ‘s ties together HoB  and HoB  in a geopolitical knot
according to which some people embody modern nihilism while other
people represent the only hope for a new metaphysics.
To be sure, Heidegger does not outline a political philosophy in any
traditional sense. He is not interested in questions about liberty, justice,
rights, authority, etc. This kind of philosophy ‘avoids the essential ques-
tion’ (GA, /). In a passage alluding to Lenin’s famous question
‘What is to be done?’ (‘Что делать?’ or in German ‘Was tun?’), he
describes the central motif of his ‘political philosophy’ in a way that is
bound to leave any political theorist dumbfounded:
Then what is to be done? That which you already had to do all along:
exercise relentlessly the simple craft of interpreting the great thinkers, of
getting used to long thinking, and think for yourself – in concealment –
that which is most necessary for you to think. (GA, /)
This shows the close relation between Heidegger’s politics and the history
of philosophy (i.e., HoB ): It is politically imperative that we study the
history of being by relentlessly reading the great thinkers!
The underlying point is that Heidegger’s support for the regime and his
projected reformation of the university is motivated by his hope for a
metaphysical revolution. Hence, he argues that the individual must both
‘restrain’ and ‘empower’ itself by binding itself to the people. He then asks:
‘What does this restraining empowerment presuppose existentielly


Löwith recalls that the students, who witnessed the rectoral address, were unsure whether they
should go home and read the pre-Socratics or go marching with the SA (, ). Well, here is
the answer.
 Heidegger’s Politics 
[existenziell]?’ His answer hinges on the assumption (HoB ) that an
understanding of being characterises a historical epoch and the idea
(HoB ) that philosophy – and in this case, Heidegger’s own philosophy –
can bring about a new such historical epoch: ‘First and last: a change in the
understanding of being! Time!’ (GA, /).
In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger aptly calls this mixture of politics and
metaphysics for ‘metapolitics’ (e.g., GA, f/). Metapolitics is not a
meta-study of the various political discourses, but rather the belief that
current political practices are supported by a specific ontological frame-
work that can be radically transformed. As Marion Heinz puts it, it is an
‘ontologisation of the political’ and a ‘politicisation of ontology’ that
supposedly leads to ‘an epochal caesura’ (, ). More precisely,
metapolitics is the nexus between (i) a communal commitment to the
people that is (ii) enforced by political institutions like the state and the
educational system, and (iii) which is philosophically ‘justified’ by refer-
ence to the history of being and its call for a cultural cum metaphysical
transformation. For Heidegger, the political revolution of state and uni-
versity is the means to this metaphysical end.

. The Jews and the Germans

The idea that Heidegger could somehow shape the National Socialist
movement to fit his own philosophical agenda – that he could ‘lead the
leader [den Führer führen]’– is hopelessly naïve. But what makes his
politics truly appalling is the way in which he maps his narrative of decline
(HoB ) and redemption (HoB ) onto ontic peoples and nations, thereby
drawing an ontological parallel to the ontic struggle between the Reich and
its (external as well as internal) enemies. It is impossible to excuse
passages like the following from  to  with the political naïveté
of an absent-minded philosopher:
The enemy can have attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of
a people and can set itself against this people’s own essence and act against
it. The struggle is all the fiercer and harder and tougher, for the least of it


Heidegger allegedly described his political engagement in these terms to Karl Jaspers (cf.
Hochkeppel ; Pöggeler ).

We have already seen Heidegger make this analogy explicit in the quote from GA that introduced
Section . above. Elsewhere, he claims that the historical task of the German people requires ‘a
readiness for sacrifice’ like that of the frontier soldiers (GA, /, /, cf. NHS, ).

See Arendt’s () comparison of Heidegger’s politics with Thales, who fell down a well while
star gazing.
 Politics and Authenticity
consists in coming to blows with one another; it is often far more difficult and
wearisome to catch sight of the enemy as such, to bring the enemy into the
open, to harbor no illusions about the enemy, to keep oneself ready for attack,
to cultivate and intensify a constant readiness and to prepare the attack looking
far ahead with the goal of total annihilation. (GA/, /)
At this time, Heidegger could not have known how literally the regime
was to carry out such an annihilation, but the very fact that he buys in to
the discourse of total annihilation is disturbing.
The external enemies are, as we have seen, America and Russia, and the
internal enemies are, among others, the Jews. In the Black Notebooks,
Heidegger frequently refers to Judaism in the years – in a way
that clearly aligns with (HoB ) the narrative of decline. In one place, he
describes his contemporary historical situation as ‘the ending of the history
of the great beginning of Western humanity’ (GA, /). The possi-
bility of a second beginning requires an interpretative struggle [Kampf]
with what he calls machination [Machenschaft] and gigantism [die Riesige].
These terms prefigure the understanding of being later known as en-
framing. Interestingly, Heidegger formulates this as a struggle between
those who have history – the Germans with their historical task – and
those who are ‘historyless’ [geschichtslos] and ‘alienated from being’ (GA,
/). This historyless enemy is ‘the greater uprootedness that, not being
bound to anything, avails itself of everything (Judaism)’ (GA, /).
He then notes that ‘the genuine [eigentliche] victory, the one of history
over what is historyless, is achieved only where what is groundless excludes
itself because it does not venture beyng but always only reckons with
entities and posits their calculations as what is real’ (GA, /f ).
Drawing upon antisemitic stereotypes (greed, a flair for calculation,
nomadic existence), Heidegger associates Judaism with the culmination
of metaphysics, with the ‘hopeless frenzy of unchained technology’
(GA, f/f ). This amounts to a form of historylessness not because
the Jewish people lack a history in the sense that they have no body of
historical facts that describe their development (this is what SZ dismisses as
‘historiology [Historie]’ [SZ, /]) but because Judaism plays an
agonistic part in the metapolitical revolution. Recalling that for
Heidegger historical communities have both past, present, and future,
both fate and mission (cf. Section . above), Judaism is deemed history-
less because it is continuous with the traditional, backwards-looking
metaphysical framework that Heidegger’s Germans rebels against.
Paradoxically, Judaism is rendered historyless by virtue of the ‘history
[Geschicklichkeit] of calculating, manipulating and interfering’
 Heidegger’s Politics 
(GA, /). In other words, the Jews are historyless because they are
embedded within the historical epoch of modernity, while the Germans
are historical in the proper sense that they make history, that is, in the sense
that they will inaugurate a new understanding of being (cf. GA, /;
GAA, ).
The Jews’ history or capacity for calculation, manipulation and inter-
fering also grounds ‘the worldlessness of Judaism’ (GA, /, my italics).
Understandably, this remark has gained some attention by commentators
(e.g., Bergo ; Mendieta ). Does Heidegger really suggest that
Jews lack being-in-the-world, that they are ontologically like nonhuman
animals or even stones?
The claim is surprising as Heidegger’s earlier work never suggests a
distinction between those human beings that have being-in-the-world and
those that do not. As Georgios Petropoulos has argued, the early concep-
tion of being-in-the-world is ‘inclusionary and arguably pluralistic’
(, ). Indeed, as we saw in Chapter , he readily admits that ‘primitive
peoples’ have being-in-the-world (SZ, ff/f; GA, /; GA/,
f/).
Heidegger would involve himself in a blatant contradiction if he claimed
both (i) that Jews are worldless in the sense of the occurrent and (ii) that
Jews have a history of or capacity for calculation, manipulation, and
interfering since the latter is an understanding of being, and any under-
standing of being requires being-in-the-world. The only systematically
viable option is to dismiss (i). Thus, I agree with Trawny that Heidegger
considers the Jews to be worldless because they allegedly embody a
particular understanding of being. More specifically, machination is the
origin of the worldlessness of Judaism (). The difference between the
Germans and the Jews is, hence, a difference between world disclosures.
Their positions within the history of being make Jews incapable of
grasping history as history and world as world. The Jews – along with
the Americans and Russians – embody the decline of the West.


Geschicklichkeit means literally skilfulness, but given Heidegger’s attentiveness to the link between
Geschichte and Geschick, it is unlikely that he would use this word without also thinking of
historicity [Geschichtlichkeit].

Heidegger’s remarks about Husserl in the Black Notebooks follow the same line of reasoning. He
acknowledges his indebtedness to Husserl and the phenomenological reduction but adds that
Husserl’s method ‘never reaches into the domains of the essential decisions [wesentlicher
Entscheidungen]; instead, it entirely presupposes the historiological tradition of philosophy’
(GA, f/). Husserl’s chief error is, hence, that he worked in continuity with the tradition.
This renders him historyless and unable to grasp the second beginning.
 Politics and Authenticity
When mapping different peoples onto the history of being, Heidegger
uses crude and frankly unconvincing social categories. Why should we
assume that these social groups have distinct understandings of being?
Heidegger never questions the plausibility or fairness of speaking about
‘Americans’, ‘Russians’, or ‘Jews’ in this way, but he does, somewhat
despite himself, realise that the Germans are not a unified people with a
single fate. In particular, ‘Ponderings III’, which was written mostly when
Heidegger was rector, shows not only his initial enthusiasm for the
National Socialist revolution but also his subsequent disappointment in
the movement.
Heidegger thus doubts that the students at the university are up for the
task of revolutionising Western metaphysics:
According to everything the students offer now at the start of this summer
semester, it must be concluded that they are disappointing all along the
line – not primarily with regard to the reconstruction, but already with
regard to the revolution within the university.
Ever so much courage and enthusiasm cannot compensate for the complete
spiritual immaturity. . . . Nevertheless, the will to vague yet certain claims
on the part of the students must be kept alive and shown the way. (GA,
/f )
But even this vague hope that the revolutionary movement will at some
point grow spiritually mature comes to nothing, and Heidegger’s disap-
pointment only grows. In a notebook entry that boldly states that he did
indeed express something essential in the rectoral address, Heidegger now
also airs his disappointment with the faculty:
The great error of the address surely consisted in its assuming that in the
purlieu of the German university there would still be a concealed group of
questioners and in still hoping that these could bring themselves to the
work of inner transformation. But neither the previous personnel, nor the
subsequent one, belong to this group. (GA, /f )
Heidegger even distinguishes between what he calls ‘vulgar Nationalism
Socialism’ (GA, /) and his own ‘spiritual National Socialism’
(e.g., GA, /, /). The difference between the two is that
vulgar National Socialism – which Heidegger increasingly identifies with
the actual political movement – remains tied to a traditional metaphysical
framework by understanding human beings through occurrent categories
like race (GA, /, /, /, /) and in accordance
with ontic domains like biology (GA, /, /, /, /
) and economy (GA, /, /). Heidegger’s spiritual
 Heidegger’s Politics 
National Socialism, on the other hand, understands human beings as the
temporal unfolding of Dasein and the Germans as the protagonists of the
metapolitical revolution.
Heidegger’s faith in the German people is a communal commitment,
and a communal commitment succeeds only if it is shared by a historical or
intergenerational community. Heidegger’s growing disillusionment with
the National Socialist movement indicates that his communal commit-
ment did, in the end, fail. After resigning from the rectorship, Heidegger
thus speaks of the ‘impotence for a genuine self-assertion’ and laments the
fact that the Nazi functionaries controlling the educational system are
entirely caught up in the old ways of thinking (GA, /). He
‘misjudged’ the greatness of the movement, when he ‘saw in National
Socialism the possibility of a transition into the other beginning’, when it
was in fact ‘the consummation of modernity’ and ‘the complete “mobilisa-
tion” of all the capacities of self-reliant humanity’ (GA, /).
Heidegger thereby finds himself caught in a strange limbo: He hopes for
a metaphysical revolution but knows the revolutionary subject to
be missing.
From this tension emerges another conception of the history of being.
In texts such as GA, the history of being is no longer conceived in terms
of geopolitics and communal commitments but in terms of an eschatology
according to which the epochal transformation is carried out by ‘the last
god’ rather than the chosen people. He explains this in the Spiegel-
interview by saying that ‘philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate
transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true
of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor’ (Heidegger
in Wolin , ). Realising that neither the present community nor
future generations can carry out his revolution, Heidegger’s commitment
is transformed so that it no longer depends on other people – on merely
human thought and endeavours. From his social and political disillusion-
ment springs a form of (absurd) faith in an absent god:
Dostoyevsky says at the end of the first chapter of Demons: ‘But whoever
has no people also has no God’. – But who does have a people, his people,
and how so? Only he who has a God – and only in that way? But who has a
God, and how so? . . . Only the relation to beyng can bestow the possibility
of a plight of the encounter with God. (GA, /)


For a more detailed analysis of Heidegger’s antisemitism, his growing disappointment in the
German people, and how this prepares the ground for his later eschatology of being, see
Knudsen ().
 Politics and Authenticity
. Heidegger’s Mistakes
I have interpreted Heidegger’s politics as a communal commitment to
what he considers to be the metaphysical destiny of the Germans. This
does not mean, however, that I consider Heidegger’s politics to follow
naturally from his social ontology. In fact, I will now argue that
Heidegger’s attempt to philosophically justify his politics contradicts his
social ontology on three counts: the disclosive function assigned to the
Führer (Section ..), the conception of community and world sharing
inherent to his geopolitics (Section ..), and the general methodological
priority that he grants to historicism over and above transcendentalism in
the history of being (Section ..).

.. The Disclosive Function of the Führer

Heidegger adopts the Führerprinzip because he assumes that statesmen –
along with poets and philosophers (GA, /) – have a particularly
important role to play in opening a new understanding of being. This goes
hand in hand with the way that Heidegger in the mid to late ‘s conceives
of world disclosure as a form of power or violence [Gewalt] possessed by
creative individuals. Using the term ‘the overwhelming’ [das
Überwältigende] (or, alternatively, ‘that which reigns supremely’) as a name
for being in the sense of the structure of intelligibility, he states that human
beings ‘use violence against the overwhelming’ (GA, /). This
suggests that humans can transform the structure of intelligibility through
their work (e.g., GA, /). Heidegger thereby locates the genesis of
world disclosure not just in human activity but in the activity of specifiable
individuals. But this presupposes that the specific creative individuals
somehow stand above and master the shared world. If they are to open a
new understanding of being, if they are to disclose the world based on their


It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Heidegger changes his mind on this issue, but his changing
attitudes towards the metaphysics of the will serves as a good indicator since the idea of the creative
individual is bound up with the idea that an act of the will can transform our understanding of
being. And for Heidegger the question of the will is inevitably bound up with the question of
Nietzsche. Thus, in , Heidegger takes Nietzsche and Hölderlin to be telling the same story
about the Greeks and the Germans, the Dionysian and the Apollonian (GA, /), while he,
in  declares that the difference in how they determine the ‘future of the Germans and of the
West’ is ‘abysmal’ (GA, ). By , the metaphysics of the will co-constitutes modern nihilism
and the disclosure of entities as ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] (e.g., GA, /).
 Heidegger’s Politics 
own creative violence, they must be able to somehow separate themselves
from the fundamental condition of being-with. If they could not separate
themselves in this way, their projections would remain intrinsically respon-
sive to the behaviour of others in a way that would undermine their
radically creative power. As in the case of the leader, the creative individual
develops an understanding of being by himself and then makes this the
communal standard. As Heidegger puts it in :
use violence as violence-doers and become those who rise high in historical
being as creators, as doers. Rising high in the site of history, they also
become apolis, without city and site, lonesome, un-canny, with no way out
amidst entities as a whole, and at the same time without ordinance and
limit, without structure and historical order [Fug], because they as creators
must first ground all this in each case. (GA, /)
In this view, certain human beings can disclose the world anew and do so
from a position that is separate from the historical order of the communal
space of intelligibility. For this reason, Heidegger writes in  that a true
leader ‘understands, considers, and brings about what people and state are,
in the living development of his own essence’ (NHS, ). The leader is,
hence, conceived of as an ontological sovereign who has the unconstrained
power to posit laws for his community.
This account of the disclosive power of the Führer clearly contradicts the
fundamental tenet of Heidegger’s social ontology, namely, the idea that
intentionality is fundamentally responsive to the behaviour of others. This
idea implies that meaning is an indeterminate product of social interaction,
whereas Heidegger now takes meaning to be the product of the creative
acts of certain individuals. Furthermore, the idea that the creative individ-
ual is ‘without structure and historical order’ contradicts the account of
social normativity elaborated above. We saw that although it is possible for
us to modify our relation to social norms, it is impossible to fully separate
ourselves from them or, to be precise, from the generic drift towards social
norms. In his political enthusiasm, Heidegger seems to have forgotten that
no self – neither the authentic self nor the self of the leader – can ‘rest upon
an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached
from the Anyone’ (SZ, /).


Clare Pearson Geiman puts the point well: The human being is ‘the creator of order and governance
for human beings, and as such unable to be bound by his own created order’ (, ). Non-
coincidentally, a similar topology is central to Carl Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty: ‘For the
legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides
whether this normal situation actually exists’ (, ).
 Politics and Authenticity

.. The Confusion Between Ontic and Ontological Conceptions

of Community and World Sharing
The Führerprinzip commits Heidegger to an authoritarian conception of
community. The leader leads and the community follows. This means that
the understanding of being characteristic of the community is dictated by
that of the leader. Symptomatically, Heidegger suggests that the world is
distributed [verteilt] rather than shared [geteilt], that everyone is assigned a
specific place and given a specific task: ‘How through leading and follow-
ing – the highest mission in the state and in the people is distributed,
interwoven, and individuated by being thrown to each respectively’
(GA, /). So, the transcendental sharing of the world is reworked
into a metapolitical authoritarianism, where the world is no longer shared
by equals but distributed to the members of the community by
their leader.
For the followers, meaning and understanding still depend on other
people, but here we have a very different kind of social externalism
compared to the one found in Heidegger’s earlier work. Open-ended
social externalism suggests that meaning is determined by our on-going
interaction with other people. But this commitment is completely over-
hauled to suit Heidegger’s politics. In fact, Heidegger’s political concep-
tion of community not only commits him to the historicist claim that
meaning is determined (rather than just shaped) by our belonging
[Zugehörigkeit] to a historical tradition but also to the idea that meaning
is determined by our subservience [Hörigkeit] to a historical tradition as
this is interpreted by the leader.
A similar problem underlies the idea of a being-historical geopolitics.
The attempt to map different peoples onto the narrative of decline (HoB )
and redemption (HoB ) of the history of being presupposes that the
Germans, the Jewish, the Americans, the Russians and so on embody
distinct understandings of being. This is dangerously close if not tanta-
mount to claiming that they inhabit distinct worlds. This would directly
contradict another aspect of open-ended social externalism.
Why should we accept the claim that different peoples have different
understandings of being? Heidegger understands community and people
as historical phenomena. A people exists by virtue of a communal
commitment to certain historical social norms. In unfolding this idea,
we must be very careful about what ‘historical’ means. Here are three
options: (a) historiological historicity: a community is historical if a body
of facts describes its chronology; (b) phenomenological historicity: a
 Heidegger’s Politics 
community is historical if it is aware of the nature of the social norms that
characterise it; or (c) being-historical historicity: a community is historical
if it occupies a distinct position within the history of being.
Heidegger’s metapolitics explicitly takes communities to be historical in
the being-historical sense. In contrast to the phenomenological sense of the
historical (which is entirely formal in that it describes a way of being aware
of social norms rather than these norms themselves), the being-historical
sense of the historical must distinguish between different communities
with reference to the content of their norms. After all, Germans,
Americans, and Jews are all Dasein and thus presumably have the same
capacity for rendering their own history ontologically transparent. Once
we claim that the geopolitical distinction between different peoples must
concern content, that is, the ontic body of facts that describe their
development, the being-historical account of historicity incorporates an
element of historiological historicity.
When contrasting the Germans with their geopolitical enemies,
Heidegger combines the idea that different peoples are (c) being-historical,
world-disclosing agents with the idea (a) that factual social groups can be
distinguished from each other by a mixture of linguistic, national, and
religious criteria. He thereby confuses ontic and ontological conceptions of
community.
This line of criticism is familiar, and philosophers such as Nancy (,
), Derrida (), and Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe () have long
taken issue with the collectivism inherent to Heidegger’s politics in the
‘s. But there is a tendency among these critics to frame Heidegger’s
development as an oscillation between an early individualism in which, as


Richard Polt has recently argued that Heidegger’s turn to politics picks up a thought laid out but
not carried through in SZ, namely, that ‘existential insights are ultimately existentiell’ and that
‘philosophical insights . . . necessarily form part of one’s way of existing at a certain historical
juncture’ (, ). According to Polt, Heidegger’s turn to the ‘collective selfhood’ of the people
follows from his very conception of philosophy insofar as philosophy requires us to decide on who
we are in a fundamentally shared world (, ). This implies, he argues, ‘a politics that would
have to be nationalist in some sense – grounded in the living, shared world of a particular group and
inciting that group to ask who it is’ (, ).
But this reading conflates the ontological–existential sense of living in a world that is inherently
and open-endedly shared with others and the ontic–existential sense of living in a particular world
that can be demarcated along the lines of nationality (or language or whatever). Polt argues that
these levels of analyses cannot be neatly separated, because authenticity requires us to take a
standpoint on who we are ‘within a concrete place, time, and community’ (, ). In the
next chapter, however, I argue that it is wrong to see the demand for authenticity as a demand that
we perform some first-order action or decision, for example, that we live in a specific community.
Rather, authenticity demands that we adopt a set of second-order attitudes on our own existence
that reflects the nature of Dasein.
 Politics and Authenticity
Nancy puts it, being-with is only a ‘banal being-alongside’ and a later
collectivism according to which the ‘ownmost structure’ of Dasein is
suddenly cashed out in terms of ‘the common’ (Nancy , ).
Although they are right in criticising the collectivism of the ‘s, this
framework is clearly inadequate for understanding Heidegger’s thought,
for, as I have argued, Heidegger was never an individualist. He always
conceived the capacities distinctive of Dasein to depend on social relations.
The error of the ‘s is, hence, how he confuses being-with, as an
ontological condition, with something that can be neatly demarcated along
ontic lines.
If he had opted for (b) the phenomenological sense of the historical,
Heidegger could have avoided these problems. On this view, being-with is
a transcendental condition for Dasein that makes specific social formations
possible without being exhausted by them. Different peoples or different
communities instantiate this condition in different ways depending on
their facticity but they never inhabit distinct worlds. According to this
sense of the historical, our historical tradition does not separate us from all
other historical traditions. Rather, historical awareness reveals that com-
munities are necessarily exposed to other communities, to different ways of
doing and seeing things, and that we, whether we like it or not, are
constantly engaged in interpretative struggles that must be negotiated
through pre-reflective triangulation and communication rather than
geopolitical warfare.

.. The Tension Between Transcendentalism and Historicism

The difference between Heidegger’s social ontology and his metapolitics
runs parallel to a general methodological tension in his thought between
transcendentalism and historicism. Transcendentalism refers to the meth-
odological aim of accounting for the necessary and universal structure that
makes our meaningful engagement with the world possible by reflecting
on our intuitively given experiences. In general, commentators who
emphasise the affinities between Heidegger and Husserl read Heidegger
as a transcendentalist. Historicism states, in the words of Westerlund,

See also Raffoul (), who, based on a reading of GA, argues that ‘[b]oth the individualistic and
communal orientations are for Heidegger nothing but two variants of the metaphysics of
subjectivity’ (, ). As I have also argued, he notes that Heidegger’s ambition is to identify
the ‘ground of all selfhood, and from thence, of all possible I, you, and we’ (, ).

See Crowell (, ), Dahlstrom (), Overgaard (), Engelland (), and the
anthology Transcendental Heidegger edited by Crowell and Malpas ().
 Heidegger’s Politics 
that ‘it is only on account of our thrownness into groundless and finite
historical contexts of meaning that we are able to experience objects as
meaningful’, and that philosophy therefore must ‘take the form of a critical
explication of its own historical predicament’ (, f ). Several commen-
tators argue that this idea is central to not only Heidegger’s later history of
being but his hermeneutic take on phenomenology in general. This is
not the place for a textual examination of this methodological tension in
Heidegger’s thought, but I will try to spell out its systematic consequences
for his social ontology.
Our preferred methodology affects how we conceive the nature of social
ontology. On the transcendentalist reading, which I have advocated above,
social ontology aims to clarify how human being-in-the-world constitu-
tively depends on and involves relations to other people. In other words,
transcendental social ontology examines the necessary correlation between
sociality and transcendence, between coexistence and world. Historicism,
on the contrary, objects to this idea of social ontology by arguing that the
basic ontological claims made about the relation between mind, world, and
sociality can, at most, describe a specific historical condition. Historicism
subdivides into a modest and a radical historicism. According to modest
historicism, philosophy must, to use Hegel‘s bon mot, grasp its time in
thought. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a fine example of this position. In
contrast, radical historicism seeks to identify and, more importantly,
transgress the limits of its own historical situation. This is where we find
Heidegger’s metapolitics and its call for a ‘second beginning’ but also ‘left-
Heideggerians’ like Agamben and Badiou. Having already discussed
modest historicism (in Section .), I’ll now focus on radical historicism.
At stake in this debate between historicism and transcendentalism is the
relation between historicity and ontology. Is it possible to make sufficient
room for historicity within a transcendental ontological framework? Or is
the ontological structure of being-in-the-world itself historically variable?


See Gadamer (), Guignon (), Kisiel (), van Buren (), and Wrathall ().

For an overview of such left-Heideggerianism, see Oliver Marchart (). Marchart argues that a
range of post-Heideggerian thinkers transpose the ontological difference between being and entities
into the realm of politics by claiming that there is a fundamental difference between the particular
ways in which we happen to organise our lives with each other (what he calls politics) and the
ultimate ground of society, the space of possibility, on which this organisation rests (what he calls
the political). Marchart further argues that theorists like Badiou and Agamben analyses the latter in
terms of its ontological categories (e.g., history, contingency, event, freedom) in a way that will lead
to an ‘increasing acceptance of the contingency and historicity of being, which potentially has a
liberating effect’ (, ), that is, they analyse ontological categories and structures in order to
transform the historical situation.
 Politics and Authenticity
Seen in this light, Heidegger’s metapolitics is not merely a quest for an
understanding of being long forgotten but an attempt to transform the
basic structures of human existence.
The first question we should ask is, of course, which kind of support
Heidegger offers for the radical historicist thesis. Recalling the various
elements of the history of being, it seems that Heidegger identifies (HoB
) a form of metaphysical trajectory that will hopefully collapse and make
room for (HoB ) a new understanding of being. Yet, he qualifies this set of
claims with reference to (HoB ) what various philosophers have meant
with the word ‘being’. But why should we accept that what philosophers
have said about the word ‘being’ have a privileged position in opening up
an understanding of being? After all, an understanding of being is multi-
faceted and underlies not only philosophical discourse but also everyday
activities like shopping, cooking, and raising a child. If we reject this claim,
the connection between politics and metaphysics falls apart. Indeed,
without this claim, Heidegger’s history of metaphysics is just that: a history
of metaphysics.
Furthermore, appeals to (HoB ) what philosophers have said about
being do not themselves prove the much stronger claim (HoB ) that the
fundamental structure of being-in-the-world cannot be described in tran-
scendental and ahistorical terms. It is entirely possible that philosophers
have simply overlooked the fundamental structure that made their philo-
sophising possible in the same way that both Descartes and Hume accord-
ing to Kant overlooked the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements,
which nonetheless made them capable of thinking in the first place.
Drawing on Richardson’s () influential Heidegger: Through
Phenomenology to Thought, commentators often present Heidegger’s turn
to the history of being as an attempt to amend the flaws in his earlier
transcendental analytic of Dasein. More specifically, it is argued that
transcendentalism, first, entails a form of subjectivism and, second, is
incapable of accounting for the historicity of truth.
First, in Olafson’s reconstruction, the problem of subjectivism is that
being, in the period of SZ, depends on Dasein and that Dasein is seen as
actively projecting its understanding of being. Hence, in the later works
[Dasein’s] active character, which was of such fundamental importance in
the account given of presence and being, is effectively eclipsed. . . . [T]he


To be clear, I suggest neither that Heidegger’s thought in toto implies radical historicism nor even
that all of Heidegger’s later thought implies radical historicism. I only claim that he tries to justify
his politics with reference to a form of radical historicism.
 Heidegger’s Politics 
active aspect of Dasein is now associated not with the uncovering of entities
as entities – that is, with being – but with the obscuration of being. This
obscuration is declared to be the hallmark of the subjectivism that has made
impossible any genuine understanding of being in modern philosophy.
(Olafson , )
However, as Heidegger says in the ‘Letter on Humanism’, even the
‘execution and completion of this other thinking that abandons
subjectivity . . . is not a change of standpoint from SZ’ even if it is a kind
of ‘turning [Kehre]’ (GA, /f ). Heidegger thus recognises that the
terminology of projection in SZ might lead to a subjectivist misinterpre-
tation (à la Sartre) where ‘projection’ is understood as a ‘human perfor-
mance’ [menschliche Leistung] (GA, /f, cf. GA, /). But it is
crucial to note that Heidegger does not say that SZ is itself subjectivist; only
that it is possible to (mis)interpret it in this way. It is possible, then, to
both grant commentators like Richardson and Olafson that Heidegger
introduces the history of being – and the related concepts of the event
[Ereignis] and the fourfold [das Geviert] – to counter this subjectivist
misinterpretation of his work, while also maintaining that this does not
require us to abandon insights won from his earlier transcendentalist
inquiry into the conditions of possibility of meaningful engagement with
the shared world. In fact, the holist thesis that intentionality depends on a
whole of both objective and social relations provides a comparable anti-
subjectivist account of world disclosure.
Second, Heidegger worries that transcendentalism is incapable of
describing our experience of truth (aletheia) as this varies between histor-
ical epochs. He writes, for instance,
The task of the grounding of Da-sein by way of thinking and poetry
overcomes the question of possibility. That question – How is such and
such possible? – is the last implementation of mathematical thinking, which
is the result of the dominance of the proposition as such, which in turn is
the result of the collapse of aletheia. (GA, /)
The argument is that the transcendental method – the inquiry into
conditions of possibility – is itself a form of mathematical thinking, and,
hence, a distinctly modern way of doing philosophy, and that this will, in
the end, prevent us from understanding truth as aletheia.
Yet, on the same page, Heidegger suggests that ‘the question of possi-
bility’ need not necessarily lead to an obfuscation of aletheia: ‘The limits
and rights of possibility and of the question of possibility are to be
established anew on the basis of a grounding of the partitioning in the
 Politics and Authenticity
(event) [Begründung der Zerklüftung im (Ereignis)]’ (GA, /). This
suggests that it might be possible to account for the condition of possibility
not of a single world disclosure or a single understanding of being but of
that which grounds a plurality of such world disclosures. We should note
that the radical historicist thesis is not necessary to account for there being
a plurality of world-disclosures. In fact, the transcendental reading makes
the same point by distinguishing between the shared world in the
ontological–existential sense, that is, the a priori structure characteristic
of any particular world, and a shared world in the ontic–existential sense,
namely, a concrete, historical realm of familiarity. In this way, both
approaches entail holistic conceptions of truth and meaning, and they
both take Dasein’s pre-reflective engagement with the world to be histor-
ical. The main difference is that the transcendentalist approach believes
that it can deduce the a priori structure of intelligibility from this historical
mode of experience.
To some this is unpalatable. How do we deduce ahistorical claims from
historical experiences? But, as I argued in Chapter , Heidegger’s tran-
scendentalism does not commit him to what we might call radical tran-
scendentalism that deduces transcendental claims from finite experience
with apodictic certainty. Instead, his transcendentalism is modest in the
sense that it takes the transcendental conditions deduced from experience
to be tentative, or, as he would put it, to be formally indicative. On this
reading, transcendental phenomenology aims to be right about the funda-
mental correlation between human and world – including the way in
which this correlation is subject to historical variation – although the
concrete analysis of this structure must be provisional. The right descrip-
tion of the correlation or, to use Heidegger’s term, of transcendence is a
philosophical ideal that we aim for.
As it turns out, we cannot seriously dispense with the transcendentalist
ideal of getting transcendence right. For what exactly is the alternative?
Heidegger’s radical historicism argues that transcendence itself is subjected
to radical transformations and that it is foolish to even attempt to describe
the structure that underlies and constraints such transformations. As such,
Heidegger can only describe the second beginning in negative terms. For
example, he writes in ‘Ponderings IV’ that the second beginning provides a
new measure for Dasein and explains that this must be a ‘measuring out as
a tearing away of the forgottenness of being, a tearing away that leaps in
and thus is an outline [Aufriß] of the essence of truth’ (GA, /).
What is the new essence of truth that comes forth in the metapolitical
revolution? It is methodologically impossible for Heidegger to say since
 Heidegger’s Politics 
any description of this new essence of truth would necessarily presuppose
that we, in our present historical situation, can indeed say something
meaningful about a fundamentally different historical situation.
Heidegger acknowledges this impasse in the next notebook entry:
The ‘history’ of philosophy – only the creative thinker knows of it, but
never does the ‘historiologist’. So that the thinking of beyng may smoothly
take its course for a long time to come, there must be impulses toward a
displacement onto the other, at once higher and deeper, course. But how
could a person endure both together: undergo this impulse and transmit it
for the others and simultaneously be content to proceed along the already
opened and common course itself? (GA, /)
The great creative thinker – who, as we recall, plays a privileged role in
opening a new understanding of being – receives an ‘impulse’ that inau-
gurates a new trajectory for Western metaphysics. But how is it possible for
this creative thinker to also become a leader, to gather a community
around him, to communicate this impulse to those lesser thinkers who
are still stuck in the old ways of thinking? Heidegger offers no solution to
this metapolitical aporia:
A simple either-or is at issue here:
either the sacrifice of the suffering of the impulses and the sacrifice of the
reticent configuration of that suffering, in that apparently it is always only
what was earlier that is spoken of, although the complete otherness of the
second beginning is thought –
or the gift of immediately proceeding on the indicated course (GA, /
f )
The radical historicist thus faces the following dilemma: Either he sacrifices
his hard-won metapolitical insight and continues to speak in the tongue of
the past even though he constantly thinks of the second beginning. Or he
accepts the gift of his new insight and stays on that trajectory even though
this causes him to remain completely silent and to remain utterly unin-
telligible to his contemporaries. According to the radical historicist, his-
torical transformations remain uncommunicable and unintelligible to
others. They remain, with Nietzsche, untimely. If we hold, as I think we
must, that philosophy is essentially discursive, radical historicism appears
rather unphilosophical.
I have argued that Heidegger’s politics amounts to an authoritarian
nationalism in which state and education serve to align the will of the
citizens with the will of the leader and his specific conception of the
national community. I have further shown that Heidegger attempts to
 Politics and Authenticity
philosophically justify his politics with reference to a form of being-
historical geopolitics. Drawing on his systematic social ontology, I have
criticised this justification on three counts: it inconsistently attributes an
exceptional type of world disclosure to the leader; it confuses ontic and
ontological senses of community and world sharing when it assumes that
each people have a distinct understanding of being thereby contradicting
Heidegger’s own open-ended social externalism; and, finally, it gives
methodological priority to historicism over and above transcendentalism,
which ultimately threatens to undermine its status as a philosophical
discourse.
It is not the task of social ontology to choose which type of government,
state, or community is best. In this sense, Heidegger’s social ontology
cannot ‘correct’ his political choices. What it can do is illuminate where
Heidegger’s justification of his choices relies on mistaken conceptions of
intersubjectivity, community, and human being-in-the-world.
  

The Demand for Authenticity

The demand, ‘Become what you are!’ – understood ontically – is

possible only if, taken ontologically, I am what I am becoming.
–Heidegger, GA

In SZ, Heidegger introduces the concept of Dasein by pointing to two

intertwining features that distinguish it from all other entities: ‘Being is
that which is an issue for every such entity’, and ‘the being of any such
entity is in each case mine [je meinig]’ (SZ, f/). This means, first, that
Dasein is not characterised by objective properties towards which it
remains indifferent. Instead, the characteristics of Dasein are at issue for
it, they are ‘possible ways for it to be’ (SZ, /). For this reason, ‘the
essence of Dasein lies in its existence’ (SZ, /). Second, the character-
istics of Dasein are not simply the attributes common to a genus but
something that each Dasein must take upon itself in its own way. Dasein
comports itself towards the possible ways of being that characterise its
concrete and unique situation.
These two features imply that we cannot distinguish different Dasein
from each other by the same means that we distinguish occurrent entities
from each other. Dasein cannot be individuated by an occurrent determi-
nation like, say, position in time and space or causal history but needs a
different principle of individuation. Heidegger suggests instead that ‘[i]n
each case Dasein is its possibility’ (SZ, /). In other words, Dasein is
what it is by virtue of the possibilities that it projects ahead of itself.
Accordingly, its ‘own self is reflected back to it from things’ (GA, /
) as these possibilities typically depend on its relation to the environ-
ment and to other people.
This peculiar type of individuation gives rise to two problems. First, one
might worry that this entails that each person is subdivided into numerous
Dasein, thereby making Heidegger’s notion of selfhood absurdly fine-
grained. Call this the volatility problem. The problem is that if Dasein is


 Politics and Authenticity
individuated by its possibilities, each change in its field of possibilities (e.g.,
no longer facing the possibility of eating dinner but now facing the
possibility of doing the dishes) seems to cause a new self to emerge.
Heidegger faces the volatility problem because he explicitly refuses to grasp
the selfhood of Dasein as a self-identity or as the immanence of conscious-
ness to itself.
In some places, he seems to bite the bullet:
But if the self is conceived ‘only’ as a way of being of this entity, this seems
tantamount to volatilizing the real ‘core’ of Dasein. Any apprehensiveness
however which one may have about this gets its nourishment from the
perverse assumption that the entity in question has at bottom the kind of
being which belongs to something occurrent, even if one is far from
attributing to it the solidity of an occurrent corporeal thing. (SZ, /)
On the other hand, it is clearly a problem for Heidegger if his intended
analysis of ‘the full and concrete human being’ cannot account for personal
identity. Heidegger’s must explain the unity or stability of the self in terms
of its existential projections, but how is that possible?
The second problem is the attributability problem. Questioning
Heidegger’s conception of selfhood from a normative rather than meta-
physical perspective, this problem focuses on the fact that we do not
identify with all the senses of self that are reflected back to us from things.
Imagine, for instance, that although I am generally known to be a nice and
gentle guy, it occasionally happens that I lose my temper in traffic and yell
obscene things at other motorists. In such situations, a sense of myself as a
road raged driver is reflected back to me, even if I feel that this is somehow
misattributed to me, that it is not really me who acts in those situations.
Now, even if we admit that the solicitations that prompt my road rage does
indeed reveal something about me, we must still explain how and why
I can find this sense of self misattributed to me. Some might be inclined to
see this as a conflict between a superficial self (the impulsive road rage-self )
and a deeper self (e.g., a narrative self, a rational self, or a self embodying
certain core values), but it is not obvious that this option is available to
Heidegger. Given that experiences of misattribution and attribution are
common, we need to reconcile them with Heidegger’s idea that the self of
Dasein is individuated by its possibilities.
These problems concern what Heidegger calls the ‘constancy’
[Ständigkeit] of the self (e.g., SZ, /) and they question the image
of the self as something at the whims of the world. Heidegger hopes to
solve both problems, to kill two birds with one stone, with his account of
authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]. Roughly put, authenticity is the idea that
 The Demand for Authenticity 
because Dasein’s self is not merely given but at stake in its existence, it can
somehow ‘choose itself’ and ‘determine its existence’ (GA, /)
thereby granting itself the constancy required to solve the volatility prob-
lem and the attributability problem.
If this is correct, authenticity has an important systematic role to play in
Heidegger’s social ontology. Yet, many commentators fear that the
account of authenticity points in a direction wholly other than that of
Heidegger’s social ontology. They take anxiety, death, and conscience to
be ‘centrifugal tendencies’, to borrow a term from Carr (, ), that
threatens to tear the individual from the fabric of the shared world. In
short, many believe that authenticity amounts to a form of individualism
that is, at best, irrelevant to his social ontology and, at worst, outright
incompatible with it.
The aim of this chapter is, first, to present a reading of authenticity that
dispels this individualistic worry and, second, to answer the volatility
problem and the attributability problem. In Section ., I outline the
formal structure of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity by arguing that
authenticity refers to those instances in which Dasein has a high degree
of continuity between its own ontological structure and its ontic
self-understanding. On this reading, authenticity does not lead to an
individualism in which Dasein engages only with individually inflected
possibilities but amounts to a form of emphatic individuation in which
Dasein adopts an ontologically transparent second-order attitude on its
own existence. In Section ., I show that Heidegger’s conception of
being-towards-death solves the volatility problem by identifying an inalien-
able possibility for each Dasein that runs through all its factical and
volatile existential projections. The authentic relation to death makes us
aware that we can endure the loss of all possibilities except the possibility of
dying and that death, therefore, is a constitutive possibility for our existence.
In Section ., I discuss Heidegger’s analysis of conscience as a solution to
the attributability problem. More specifically, I argue that conscience
demands that we assume responsibility for the factical possibilities
lying ahead of us in the sense that we come to see them as attributable
to us as agents and, hence, as disclosive of who we are. Finally, in Section
., I discuss what Heidegger’s notion of authenticity entails for his
conception of being-with by addressing, first, the way in which attribut-
ability figures in both face-to-face relations and in larger communities
and, second, how authenticity, despite being fundamentally different
from moral obligations, demands that we relate to others in a
particular way.
 Politics and Authenticity

. What Is Authenticity? Some Preliminary Remarks

SZ introduces the ‘existentialist’ themes central to authenticity as the
solution to a mainly methodological issue. For example, the question that
motivates the analysis of anxiety is whether there is ‘in Dasein an under-
standing mood in which Dasein has been disclosed to itself in some
distinctive way’ (SZ, /).
The problem is that Heidegger, at the end of Division I, still lacks the
phenomenological evidence that would enable him to account for ‘the
primordial totality of Dasein’s structural whole’ (SZ, /). He still needs
to show that the various analyses of Division I provide a unitary and complete
account of Dasein. This requires that he identifies some experience, some
phenomenological evidence, in which Dasein discloses itself to itself in an
undisturbed way. ‘The way of disclosure in which Dasein brings itself before
itself must be such that in it Dasein becomes accessible as simplified in a
certain manner’ (SZ, /). Dasein must see itself for what it is.
There is, however, widespread agreement among commentators that the
significance of authenticity vastly exceeds this important but limited meth-
odological issue. Unfortunately, there is no agreement what exactly this
amounts to. Existentialists – like Sartre and Beauvoir – take authenticity
to name the way in which an individual breaks free from the conformism
characteristic of everyday life through a ‘self-constituting activity’ (Guignon
, ). Aristotelians suggests that authenticity names a particularly skilful
or phronetic way of navigating the possibilities of a specific situation
(cf. Kisiel , ff; McNeill , ). Lastly, transcendentalists
(Crowell ; Golob ; Kukla ) think the account of authenticity
locates the normative dimension of human existence that is necessary to explain
our ability to act in light of norms rather than just in conformity to them.
It would take us too far off course to discuss these rich but largely
incompatible interpretations in any detail. But even this cursory overview
allows us to glimpse the difficulty of providing a coherent account of
Heidegger’s notion of authenticity: it is partly a methodological concept,
partly an existential ideal, and partly a condition of possibility for
normativity.

.. Authenticity, Ontological Understanding, and Ontic Understanding:

A Formal Framework
To get the ball rolling, I will offer a formal analysis of authenticity. Any
account is bound to be controversial, but I hope that my framework is
 The Demand for Authenticity 
flexible enough to be palatable to most. After outlining the framework,
I give it a test run in Section .. by analysing Heidegger’s description of
anxiety. In Sections . and ., I then move on to his accounts of death
and conscience and argue that these solve the volatility problem and the
attributability problem, respectively.
The key to understanding Heidegger’s notion of authenticity is to
recognise that Dasein is subject to a particularly problematic type of
individuation. Dasein’s self is not merely a given but is something that is
constantly at stake in its existence. Dasein is its possibilities, yet its
existence is also shaped by how it relates to these possibilities.
And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility; it can, in
its very being, ‘choose’ itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never
win itself; or only ‘seem’ to do so. But only in so far as it is essentially
something which can be authentic – that is, something of its own – can it
have lost itself and not yet won itself. (SZ, f/)
Dasein not only is in each case its own possibility; because its own being is
an issue for it, it also relates to itself as such a possibility. The distinction
between authenticity and inauthenticity amounts to two different ways in
which Dasein relates to itself. Authenticity is when Dasein wins, chooses,
or grasps itself, that is, when it displays a proper or adequate self-relation.
Conversely, inauthenticity is when Dasein displays an improper or inad-
equate self-relation and thus loses, flees from, or misrecognises itself.
Commentators often note that Heidegger’s description of authenticity
suffers from ambiguity. Carman argues that there is a tension between
authenticity in a normative–evaluative sense, which describes ‘a desirable or
choice-worthy mode of existence’, and authenticity in a formal sense,
which refers to ‘one’s immediate relation to oneself’ (, f ). In a
similar vein, Reid identifies what he calls ‘authenticity in an ontic key’.
This refers to the ability to choose something of one’s own in contrast to
‘the norms and standards that apply indifferently to anyone and no one’
(, f ). This is opposed to an ontological form of authenticity,
which requires that we display ‘adequately and transparently the structure
of beings like us’ (, f ). In keeping with Heidegger’s remarks that
the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity is not evaluative
(e.g., GA, /; SZ, /, f/; GA, /), both
Carman and Reid prioritise the ontological or formal concept of authen-
ticity over and above the ontic or evaluative. Although they are right in
doing so, their attempts at disambiguating Heidegger’s text are insufficient
as they fail to clarify the exact type of self-relation at stake in authenticity.
 Politics and Authenticity
Carman, for instance, claims that ‘the distinction between authenticity and
inauthenticity . . . simply points to the formal distinction between Dasein’s
ontologically unique relation to itself in contrast to its relation to others, or
to itself viewed from an alienated second- or third-person point of view’
(, ). But this cannot be right since even inauthentic existence
must be lived from a first-person perspective and must have reference to
someone for whom this life is significant. So, how do we determine
whether a self-relation is adequate or inadequate, authentic or inauthentic?
To answer this question, we must make explicit a distinction between
two types of understanding that is central to the project of SZ (see Schear
). First, we have ontological understanding. This is our basic grasp of
what an entity is, for example, whether it is Dasein, a nonhuman animal,
or an inert object. This level of understanding does not discern individual
features of concrete entities – for example, which type of animal or what
sort of person an entity is – but discloses the entity as having a general type
of relation to the world, as either world-building, world-poor, or worldless
(e.g., GA/, f/). The idea of ontological understanding is central
to the very project of fundamental ontology as it picks out a crucial feature
of what Heidegger calls Dasein’s understanding of being. As we recall,
Dasein has an ontic priority above all other types of entities because it
alone possesses ontological understanding of itself and of other entities
even if this level of understanding has gone largely unrecognised in the
philosophical tradition.
Second, ontic understanding places a specific entity within a field of
possibilities. It allows us to understand a as b. Importantly, ontic under-
standing presupposes ontological understanding in the sense that it gives a
concrete or factical shape to the general type of relation between entity and
world that is disclosed in ontological understanding (SZ, /). For
example, I ontologically understand an entity as a nonhuman animal and thus
as relating to its environment in a specific way, and I ontically understand it
as, say, a beetle looking for food. In Heidegger’s words: ‘In the projecting of
the understanding, entities are disclosed in their possibility. The character of
the possibility corresponds, on each occasion, with the kind of being of the
entity which is understood’ (SZ, /). Here, ontological understanding
makes us aware of ‘the kind of being of the entity’, whereas ontic under-
standing places the entity within a concrete field of possibilities.


Ontic understanding can be practical or theoretical. Practical understanding is a tacit and pre-
reflective way of comporting oneself towards a as b or, to put the same point differently, of projecting
an entity onto a field of possibilities. The paradigm of practical understanding is Dreyfusian skilful
 The Demand for Authenticity 
Instances of ontic understanding can exhibit a high or a low degree of
continuity with their underlying ontological understanding. For example,
Heidegger introduces the project of SZ by saying that the analysis is
authentic [eigentlich] when the entities with which it concerns itself ‘show
themselves with the kind of access that genuinely belongs to them’
(SZ, /). Later, he argues that the available is grasped ‘authentically’
when we cease to examine it theoretically and allow it to withdraw and
become transparent in our usage (SZ, /). Most importantly, Dasein is
‘inauthentic’ when it understands itself by way of innerworldly entities
(GA, /) or when it understands itself ‘in terms of the world’
(SZ, /; /). Conversely, it is authentic when its self-
understanding arises ‘out of its own self as such’ (SZ, /). The main
idea here is that our ontic understanding can recognise or misrecognise its
own condition of possibility, namely, our ontological understanding.
I suggest that Heidegger’s concept of authenticity refers to a mode of
existence that exhibits a high degree of continuity between its ontological
understanding of itself and its ontic understanding of itself. I thus agree
with Golob that
[t]he defining feature of authenticity . . . is that Dasein accurately under-
stands its own nature: i.e. it makes sense of itself . . . in a way that reflects
the facts about Dasein that texts such as SZ have supposedly identified.
(Golob , )
This does not necessarily mean that Dasein must entertain a set of
theoretical propositions about its own being. To be authentic means,
rather, that we must adopt certain second-order attitudes towards our
own actions and beliefs, and these second-order attitudes must reflect
Dasein’s own nature.
To summarise, Dasein has an ontological understanding of its own type
of being and the type of being of certain other entities. We would not be
Dasein if we lacked this ontological understanding. However, we might

coping. In contrast, theoretical understanding is an explicit and reflective way of comporting oneself
towards a as b. To use Heidegger’s example, an assertion is a form of theoretical understanding
insofar as the assertion projects an entity (e.g., a proposition or a concept) onto a field of possibilities
(as constituted by, for instance, the rules that determines what counts as a valid inference within a
specific discourse) in a way that largely abstracts from our embodied practices (SZ, /).
Ontology – or other philosophical disciplines – would be another example of a theoretical
understanding. In Heidegger’s view, traditional metaphysics constitute a particularly problematic
form of theoretical understanding because it not only abstracts from the embodied practice of
practical understanding but also obscures ontological understanding by characterising what entities
are in fundamentally inadequate terms (e.g., Dasein as animal rationale or available entities as
brute facts).
 Politics and Authenticity
misconstrue our ontological understanding of entities in our ontic under-
standing of them. Heidegger often points out that I can comport myself
towards myself in such a way that I ontically understand myself solely in
terms of innerworldly entities or activities. In doing so, I obscure certain
crucial features of my own being. This makes me inauthentic. It remains to
be seen which exact second-order attitudes must be adopted to correct this
flawed self-understanding.
This formal framework is clearly compatible with the idea that authen-
ticity is a methodological concept as a continuity between ontological
understanding and ontic understanding is paramount to the project of
fundamental ontology. The ambition of SZ is ‘never to allow . . . fancies
and popular convictions’ to obscure our ontological understanding but
rather ‘to make [it] the scientific theme’ of our investigation (SZ, /
). Furthermore, one might also see this framework as a way of account-
ing for a particular normative dimension of human existence because it
enables us to draw a distinction between a life lived in light of our own
being rather than merely in structural conformity to it. Regarding the idea
that authenticity is an existentiell ideal, one could, for instance, try to make
the case that once we understand ourselves in light of our own being a
wholly different way of life becomes possible or one could argue, more
modestly, that the existentiell ideal consists in the fact that some people
who possess an ontologically adequate self-understanding can help others
understand themselves in the right way. (I argue something along these
lines in Section ..)

.. The Emphatic Individuation of Anxiety

The analysis of anxiety is the starting point of the account of authenticity.
As a first approximation, let us see how it fits with this formal framework.
As noted, the main problem is that if Dasein merely understands itself
in terms of innerworldly activities like that of being a father or an
academic, it does not grasp its own ontological structure since the factical
possibility of being a father or an academic does not exhaust the potenti-
ality-for-being characteristic of Dasein. In a way reminiscent of Sartre’s
waiter (, ), we tend to flee from our being by, for instance,
identifying with the sense of self inherent to our social and practical roles.
Heidegger calls such ontic preoccupation with innerworldly entities and
activities for ‘fallenness’ (SZ, §). When fallen, Dasein ‘exists primarily in
a forgetfulness of its own self’, that is, it exists in a way that is ignorant of
or deluded about its own nature (GA, /).
 The Demand for Authenticity 
Although it is an existential feature of Dasein, fallenness also constitutes
an obstacle to fundamental ontology because it prevents us from under-
standing ourselves as Dasein. To identify (in a strong sense of the term)
with a particular social role is to adopt a particular second-order attitude
towards our own existence. For instance, I might take being an academic
to exhaust my being, to be my essence. Yet, this is a fallen self-forgetfulness
since Dasein is not predetermined and has no essence. In this case, my
ontic self-understanding fails to reflect my ontological self-understanding
as Dasein.
In anxiety, Heidegger finds a counterforce to this type of self-
forgetfulness. Unlike fear (e.g., fear of failing academically), anxiety does
not have an innerworldly entity or an innerworldly activity as its object.
Anxiety amounts to a radical breakdown of meaning that renders all
innerworldly entities and activities normatively inert. As a result, the
structure of ‘worldhood’, which was previously a non-thematic function
of our awareness, suddenly ‘obtrudes’ or becomes thematic (SZ, /).
In this process, Dasein loses the possibility of its fallen or world-absorbed
self-understanding; ‘anxiety takes away from Dasein the possibility of
understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the “world” and the way things
have been publicly interpreted’ (SZ, /).
The positive outcome of this breakdown is that Dasein becomes aware
of its own ontological structure: ‘What oppresses us is not this or that, nor
is it the summation of everything occurrent; it is rather the possibility of the
available in general; that is to say, it is the world itself’ (SZ, /). The
object of anxiety is our potentiality-for-being, our being-in-the-world itself
(SZ, /). Thus, anxiety causes us to ontically understand what we
already understand ontologically, namely, that we are Dasein rather than
just fathers and academics. To borrow a term from Thomson (, ),
we come to understand ourselves as ‘a kind of bare existential projecting’
that is irreducible to any of the factical or existentiell projects that we are
usually absorbed in.
Interestingly, Heidegger associates the continuity thereby established
with what he calls Vereinzelung. This term is typically, but misleadingly,
translated as ‘individualisation’. The problem with this term is that it
highlights the sociological connotations of Vereinzelung. Thus, the term
individualisation usually refers to an empirical process in which individuals
come to rely mostly or solely on their own personal abilities. But anxiety
cannot lead to individualisation in this sense, since anxiety brackets all
determinate possibilities of being, including both individual and collective
projects. In his later works, Heidegger even explicitly rejects that this is
 Politics and Authenticity
what he has in mind: ‘Vereinzelung – this does not mean that man clings to
his frail little “I” that puffs itself up against something or other which it
takes to be the world’ (GA/, /; cf. GA, /).
Instead, I follow Withy in translating Vereinzelung with individuation.
As she puts it, the aim of Vereinzelung is to become ‘ontologically indi-
viduated as the kind of entity that one is (Dasein) in distinction from other
kinds of entities’ (, ). This form of individuation is complex. On
the one hand, Dasein’s individuation is an ontological given qua its
ontological understanding. But on the other hand, Dasein must ontically
understand what is thus ontologically given. When Dasein is brought
before itself in anxiety, it understands its own individuation. Authentic
self-understanding is, hence, a form of emphatic individuation in which
that which has been individuated (Dasein) grasps its own individuation
(as Dasein).
The following passage shows how anxiety enacts such an emphatic
individuation:
Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about – its
authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world. Anxiety individuates [verein-
zelt] Dasein for its ownmost [eigenstes] being-in-the-world, which as some-
thing that understands, projects itself 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 individuated in individuation [vereinzeltes in der Vereinzelung].
(SZ, f/)
Anxiety individuates because it throws Dasein back upon ‘its ownmost
being-in-the-world’ or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘its ownmost possibility’. As
all determinate possibilities of being are normatively inert, this ownmost
possibility is nothing but ‘the fact that I am, that is, “I am” in the sense of
the naked being-in-the-world’ (GA, /). The ownmost possibility
is, in extension, not some substantial or determinate factical possibility
(i.e., the possibility of being a father or an academic) but the formal and
indeterminate possibility that I have to be an entity in the world, that is,
that my being is essentially a being-possible (SZ, /).
Yet, anxiety is, as Heidegger admits, relatively rare (SZ, /). This
being the case, one might object that this analysis merely reveals a single
self, S, individuated by the possibility of anxiety or ‘naked’ being-in-the-
world and that S competes with the selves individuated by other possi-
bilities – like that of being a father, S, or an academic, S. If we reject all
occurrent determinations of Dasein’s individuation, why should we believe
that S is the same self as S and S? Indeed, why should we accept
 The Demand for Authenticity 
Heidegger’s claim that S is more fundamental than S and S? If anxiety is
rare, it seems that the self disclosed in anxiety is equally rare. And if this is
the case, anxiety alone solves neither the volatility problem nor the
attributability problem. It fails to bring into view the ‘the whole of
Dasein – this entity from its “beginning” to its “end”’ (SZ, /).

. Being-Towards-Death and the Constancy of the Self

Heidegger needs to show that ‘the ownmost possibility’ disclosed in
anxiety is not just the fleeting possibility of a rare mood. He needs, in
other words, to show that ‘the ownmost possibility’ is a structural feature of
all Dasein’s existential projections. I thus agree with Carman (, ff )
that anxiety, as ‘an occasional contingent episode in which our everyday
familiar world collapses’, is insufficient to identify ‘a primitive fact about,
or primordial structure of, being-in-the-world’. This is one of the central
tasks assumed in SZ’s Division II.
Heidegger quickly suggests that an analysis of death is pivotal if he is to
grasp the whole of Dasein. After all, death is the end or consummation of
life. Yet, death seems to evade Heidegger’s general phenomenological
approach, since none of us has ever experienced death. On the one hand,
death is the consummating possibility of Dasein’s existence, but, on the
other hand, once this possibility is actualised, Dasein ceases to be. As
Heidegger puts it: Dasein’s ‘being is annihilated when what is still out-
standing in its being has been liquidated’ (SZ, /)
Heidegger attempts to solve this aporia by distinguishing between three
interrelated phenomena. First, perishing [Verenden] refers to the event in
which vital organs in a biological organism cease to function (SZ, /;
/). However, as a biological or physiological term, perishing does
not apply to the end of Dasein, since Dasein is, strictly speaking, not a
biological organism but a world-building entity that makes sense of both
itself and other entities. Second, he argues that although Dasein never
perishes, it ‘can end without authentically dying’. This is the ‘intermediate
phenomenon’ of ‘demise’ [Ableben] (SZ, /). Commentators gener-
ally agree that demise is ‘a terminal collapse [of our intelligible worlds]
that, by all appearances, accompanies perishing’ (cf. Blattner , ;
Thomson , ). Thus, we might contrast the biological death of
perishing with the biographical death of demise (cf. Carman , ).
The problem is, however, that demise is still an identifiable event in which
a given person is no longer ‘there’. Demise is a possibility that is sooner or
later actualised for everyone. As such, it cannot designate a properly
 Politics and Authenticity
existential or first-personal conception of death, since my death is some-
thing that I in principle cannot experience. Heidegger, therefore, specifies
a third meaning of death that he simply calls ‘death’ [Tod] and ‘dying’
[sterben]. As he puts it, ‘“dying” stand[s] for that way of being in which
Dasein is towards its death’ (SZ, /).
We should note two things about this initial characterisation of death:
First, death is not an event, not a possibility that can be actualised. Once
the possibility of Dasein’s end is actualised, once Dasein demises, the
entity that cares about its own being ceases to be. Therefore, a properly
existential approach to death must consider it a ‘way of being’ rather than
the event of not-being. Death is a limit that Dasein constitutively moves
towards, without ever arriving. ‘[D]eath is only in an existentiell being
towards death’ (SZ, /). This means that, technically speaking,
there is no such thing as death; death is never actual but is only as an
‘unsurpassable’ possibility (SZ, /). Second, and in continuation of
this, Dasein does not die at some point in time (SZ, /). Rather,
Dasein is constantly dying: ‘Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over
as soon as it is’ (SZ, /). This is so because death is a constitutive
possibility for Dasein – a possibility without which Dasein would not
(or no longer) be.
Being-towards-death is a possibility for us, but it is a possibility unlike
any of our other possibilities. Unlike the factical possibilities stripped away
in anxiety, being-towards-death is inalienable. It is independent of our
innerworldly engagements with things and other people: being-towards-
death ‘makes manifest that all being-alongside the things with which we
concern ourselves, and all being-with others, will fail us when our own-
most potentiality-for-being is the issue’ (SZ, /). Thus, in addition
to being unsurpassable, death is a non-relational [unbezügliche] possibility
(SZ, /).
Heidegger summarises his account of being-towards-death by stating
that ‘[d]eath is the possibility of the utter impossibility of Dasein. Thus
death reveals itself as the ownmost, non-relational, and unsurpassable
possibility’ (SZ, /). This states, first, that death is the possibility of
impossibility because it is the possibility that the entity defined by its being-
possible will no longer project possibilities ahead of itself. Second, death is
the ownmost possibility because this possibility cannot be taken away from
Dasein as long as it is Dasein rather than, say, a corpse. Third, death is
non-relational because it, in contrast to all ordinary or factical possibilities,
does not depend on our relations to things and other people. Fourth, death
is unsurpassable because it is a possibility that can never be actualised since
 The Demand for Authenticity 
any such actualisation negates the very entity capable of having such
a possibility.
Like anxiety, being-towards-death allows Dasein to ‘stand before itself
in its ownmost potentiality-for-being’, and, as we noted above, ‘this is a
possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s being-in-the-
world’ (SZ, /). This has led some commentators to claim that
‘anxiety and existential death are two sides of the same coin: global
indifference that undercuts any impetus to lead one sort of life or another’
(Blattner , , ). I agree with Blattner that both anxiety and
being-towards-death leave us face to face with our ownmost possibility of
naked being-in-the-world, that is, the possibility of being a projector of
possibilities that is not bound to any determinate project, but I think we
should resist the temptation to identify death and anxiety. As I read it,
death differs from anxiety because being-towards-death emphasises a pos-
sibility that is a permanent or constitutive feature of Dasein’s being rather
than the outcome of a rare psychological happening.
One of the arguments in favour of identifying anxiety and death is that
this clarifies Heidegger’s somewhat confusing distinction between death
and demise. In contrast to those commentators who believe that
Heidegger’s notion of death maps on to the phenomenon that we usually
associate with mortality in a rather straightforward way (e.g., Hoffman
; Mulhall ), a number of commentators thus expound what has
been called a world collapse theory of death (Thomson , ) according
to which death refers to the experience of ‘global indifference’ (Blattner) or
the breakdown of a ‘way of living’ (Haugeland , ff ). Similarly,
being-towards-death ‘means being ready, willing, and able to embrace a
particular and essentially fragile set of possibilities, even as they tend to
dissolve by their own inertia’ (Carman , ). This implies, in the
words of Thomson, that death for Heidegger is ‘something that you can
live through’ (Thomson , ).
I agree that we should not conflate death and demise. Yet I find world
collapse theories unacceptable both textually and philosophically. Starting
with the textual point, consider the following description of death offered
by Thomson:
Heidegger’s solution . . . is that in the desolate experience he calls ‘death,’
the self – temporarily cut off from the world in terms of which it usually
understands itself – finds itself radically alone with itself, and so can lucidly
comprehend itself in its entirety for the first time, since there is no
worldly futural component of itself to elude its self-transparent grasp.
(Thomson , )
 Politics and Authenticity
In Thomson’s reading, death is an experience in which the self finds itself
cut off from the world. This renders Dasein’s typical, fallen ways of
understanding itself impossible. Thus, like Blattner, Thomson takes death
to be roughly identical to anxiety in which Dasein is confronted with ‘the
fundamental lack of fit between our underlying existential projecting and
the specific existentiell (or everyday) worldly projects in terms of which we
each flesh out our existence and so give shape to our world’ (, ).
By suggesting that death is ‘something that you can live through’ and that
it is a ‘desolate experience’, however, this line of interpretation takes
death to be something that can actually happen to Dasein. Otherwise, it
makes no sense to say that you ‘experience’ death or that you ‘live through’
it. Thereby, world collapse theories contradict Heidegger’s repeated
claim that death is a possibility that cannot be actualised, that being-
towards-death is a possibility ‘as far as possible from anything actual’
(SZ, /f ).
Let us turn to the systematic rather than textual point. World collapse
theories describe death as the collapse of factical possibilities and being-
towards-death as the acknowledgement that our possibilities are inherently
fragile. It follows that an individual can die multiple times. ‘To say that
Dasein is always dying is to say that you can be dying, even dead, precisely
when you are in perfectly good health and in the middle of a career, a
marriage, a life’ (Carman , ). But if this is the case, world collapse
theories affirm, rather than solve, the volatility problem. To put it point-
edly, if death is simply the closing down of factical possibilities, nothing
ensures that all these deaths are my deaths. Wouldn’t ‘I’ simply die along
with these possibilities? If we accept this notion of death, we are unable to
account for that which unites this series of non-terminal deaths into the
deaths of a single self. Of course, one could simply accept the volatilisation
of the self, but then we should reject the intuition that there is anything
resembling a unity ‘“between” birth and death’ (SZ, /) and cease
talking as if the same self could be ‘cut off’ from the world multiple times.
The challenge is, then, to show that death individuates Dasein in a way
that runs through the potential breakdown of all factical possibilities, while
also keeping death analytically separate from demise. The key is to remem-
ber that demise is an event. It is what happens on the death bed when the
realm of intelligibility disappears terminally (due to the biological organ-
ism perishing). What is death, then? Death is not demise, because it is not
the terminal event of non-existence. Death is also not identical to anxiety,
because it is not the event of our factical possibilities breaking down. It is
not an event, because death – unlike our impending demise and our
 The Demand for Authenticity 
possibility of or readiness for anxiety (e.g., SZ, /) – cannot be
actualised. Rather, my death is a constitutive possibility that cannot break
down and that cannot be actualised as long as I am myself. Hence, being-
towards-death is a structural feature of Dasein that runs through all its
concrete, contingent, and alienable projects.
I grant that the ownmost possibility faced in being-towards-death is, in
fact, the same possibility faced in anxiety, namely, the possibility of naked
being-in-the-world. ‘Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety’ (SZ, /
). But it is only by virtue of being-towards-death that Dasein realises
that this possibility is a structural feature of all existential projections. Now,
it follows from the fact that Dasein is its possibilities, from the fact that it
gets its sense of self through the possibilities that it projects ahead of itself,
that proper being-towards-death provides Dasein with a sense of self that runs
through all its volatile possibilities and all of its volatile selves. This means that
being-towards-death provides Dasein with a form of constancy or stability
[Ständigkeit] (SZ, /) – a sense of its own self as capable of enduring
the momentary collapses of meaning known from anxiety. This endurance
is what Heidegger calls anticipation. ‘Anticipation brings Dasein face to
face with a possibility which is constantly certain but which at any
moment remains indefinite as to when that possibility will become an
impossibility’ (SZ, /). Anticipation is the proper or transparent way
of comporting oneself to the ontological fact of being-towards-death.
‘[D]eath lays claim to [Dasein] as individuated [als einzelnes] . . . This
individuation is a way in which the “there” is disclosed for existence’
(SZ, /).
In anticipation, we ontically understand that we are ontologically indi-
viduated by a possibility that runs through all volatile world configura-
tions. This does not require that we abandon our factical projects for new
ones but that we see them in light of the constitutive possibility of dying,
that is, that we adopt an ontologically transparent second-order attitude on
these projects. This second-order attitude tells us that all our factical
possibilities are fragile but that we are capable of living through their
potential breakdown.

. Conscience and Attributability

I have argued that Heidegger’s account of being-towards-death solves the
volatility problem by identifying an inalienable possibility that runs
through all Dasein’s factical projects. Now, we need to see how this helps
to solve the attributability problem.
 Politics and Authenticity
Heidegger clearly intends his account of authenticity to address the
attributability problem. For instance, he concludes his analysis of death
by saying that in being-towards-death
one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from one’s lostness in
those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and
one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically
understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that
possibility which is not to be outstripped. (SZ, /)
This passage alludes to the existentiell impact of authenticity, namely, that
authentic Dasein stands in a different relation to its own factical possibil-
ities: it can now ‘freely’ ‘choose among’ them. This suggests that Dasein
no longer pursues the possibilities lying in front of it by default but that it
now stands in a different normative relation to them. To continue the
example from above, we might conjecture that the liberated Dasein
now chooses how to respond to the other motorists rather than
simply yelling something at them in a quasi-automatic way. However, at
this point in Heidegger’s argument, it is less than clear why the
lucid comprehension of our ownmost possibility of impossibility would
lead to this kind of ‘liberation’. The analysis of conscience provides
this argument.
Conscience issues a ‘call’ in which Dasein is both the caller and the one
to whom the call is made (SZ, /). What is remarkable is that the
pang of conscience reaches Dasein in a way that disregards ‘what Dasein
counts for, can do, or concerns itself with in being with one another
publicly’ and ‘what it has taken hold of, set about, or let itself be carried
along with’ (SZ, /). In short, the pang of conscience does not target
us with reference to our practical identities or our social statuses but
summons us independently of all such criteria and qualifications.
Crowell rightly notes that the call of conscience involves a ‘radical indexi-
cality’ that forces Dasein to grasp itself ‘in an immediate, non-criterial, and
non-inferential way’ (Crowell , f ).
Conscience thereby bypasses the sense of self inherent to the way in
which Dasein is solicited to respond to socially typified possibilities. As
Heidegger puts it, ‘[c]onscience summons Dasein’s self from its lostness in
the “Anyone”’ (SZ, /). This appeal ‘remains indefinite and empty
in its “what”,’ and yet Dasein faces itself ‘unequivocally and unmistakably’
(SZ, /). Like anxiety and being-towards-death, conscience involves
emphatic individuation, where I become aware of myself in a way that is
irreducible to the senses of self offered to me in everyday activities.
 The Demand for Authenticity 
Although what Heidegger has said so far does not outright contradict
our ordinary understanding of conscience, his focus seems somewhat one-
sided. After all, we typically experience the pang of conscience when we
have failed to live up to a particular demand. This suggests that although
conscience is issued by Dasein to Dasein in an unmistakable way, it also
tells us that we have failed in regards to, say, be a good father. If this is
correct, the ‘what’ of conscience is, pace Heidegger, not ‘indefinite
and empty’.
Heidegger acknowledges this objection and admits that conscience
typically tells us that we are guilty in a determinate way. According to this
ordinary notion of guilt, I am guilty in the sense that I owe something to
someone, that I cause harm to someone else, or that I fail to conform to
some law or norm (SZ, /f ). In Heidegger’s summary, being guilty
in this ordinary sense is ‘being the reason [Grundsein] for a lack [Mangel] of
something in the Dasein of an other’ (SZ, /). This roughly corre-
sponds to the ordinary conception of guilt according to which I am guilty
if I can actualise either possibility A or possibility B, and I (ought to) know
that actualising possibility A violates another person’s justified expectations
and demands, but I do so anyway. The violation of another person’s
expectations and demands is what Heidegger calls ‘a lack of something
in the Dasein of an other’.
Heidegger, however, believes that this ordinary conception of guilt must
be subjected to a further ontological analysis: ‘If any understanding of the
essence of guilt is possible at all, then this possibility must have been
sketched out in Dasein beforehand’ (SZ, /). The point is that if
conscience is to have any bite – if it is to have any normative force on me –
I must be fundamentally disposed towards guilt already. Let us call this
basic disposition for existential guilt.
In ordinary guilt, I am characterised by a lack because I have wittingly
actualised one possibility rather than another at the expense of another
person. Like ordinary guilt, existential guilt concerns Dasein’s relation to
its possibilities, but unlike ordinary guilt, existential guilt is a condition of
Dasein’s existence as such rather than a phenomenon that emerges when a
set of conditions regarding a specific action and a specific situation are met.
Heidegger points to the fact that Dasein by its very being is thrown into
one set of possibilities rather than another and, hence, that Dasein always
already lives one life at the expense of another life: ‘in having a potentiality-
for-being [Dasein] always stands in one possibility or another: it constantly
is not other possibilities, and it has waived these in its existentiell projec-
tion’ (SZ, /).
 Politics and Authenticity
Reserving the term ‘lack’ [Mangel] for the ordinary choosing one
possibility over another, Heidegger now uses the term ‘nullity’
[Nichtigkeit] to designate the way in which Dasein always already and
non-deliberately pursues some possibilities at the expense of others. The
lack in ordinary guilt implies that the agent is in control of choosing A
rather than B. In contrast, the nullity of existential guilt means ‘never to
have power over one’s ownmost being from the ground up’ (SZ, /).
Dasein always exists as a factical potentiality-for-being that it has never
deliberately chosen and must find a way to cope with this fact. Playing
with the ambiguity of the term Grund, which can mean both basis, cause
and reason, he says that Dasein ‘has been released from its basis [Grund],
not through itself but to itself, so as to be as this reason [Grund]’ (SZ, /
). As thrown, Dasein exists in a set of factical possibilities that it has not
itself chosen. These possibilities function as a quasi-causal basis for its
existence, but insofar as Dasein concerns itself with its own being, it must
assume responsibility for these possibilities; it must come to see them as
reasons for its conduct.
Since these possibilities have not been deliberately chosen, they do not
constitute reasons in the traditional sense. In Heidegger’s view, any
attempt of justifying our factical possibilities will come to a dramatic halt
once it reaches the contingent basis of our thrownness. As we might say
with Wittgenstein: ‘If I have exhausted the justification [die Begründungen]
I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say:
“This is simply what I do”’ (, ). Like Wittgenstein, Heidegger
believes that human finitude implies that all justification rests on a con-
tingent ground that we cannot distance ourselves from.
Heidegger expresses this in another memorable but enigmatic formula-
tion: ‘Care’ means ‘being the (null) reason [(nichtige) Grundsein] for a
nullity [Nichtigkeit]’ (SZ, /). As we saw above, Dasein is the reason
for a nullity because Dasein necessarily exists in a set of factical possibilities
at the expense of all other ways of existing. I might as well have lived the
life of a firefighter than an academic. However, the call of conscience
demands that we assume responsibility for this way of existing: Care means
being the reason for a nullity. Thus, the fact that I live the life of an
academic rather than a firefighter is contingent but not arbitrary as I can
try to justify it by reference to my interests, forming influences, and so on.
Yet, any attempt to justify my way of life is bound to reach bedrock at
some point, as I cannot justify why my interests are thus and so or
why certain influences inspired me rather than others. Therefore, my
being-a-reason is itself null; sooner or later my reasons stop at the
 The Demand for Authenticity 
contingent fact of my thrownness. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, I am then
inclined to say: ‘This is simply who I am’.
One might object that this rejection of the principle of sufficient reason
testifies to the normative bankruptcy of Heidegger’s conception of the
human being, and that Dasein is structurally incapable of adopting a
normative stance towards itself. I disagree. As Heidegger argues in ‘On
the Essence of Ground’, the why-question (e.g., ‘Why in this way and not
otherwise? Why this and not that?’ [GA, /]) is possible only
because Dasein in its existential projections pursue certain possibilities at
the expense of others. Although Dasein never chooses its thrownness and
never gets its factical ground into its power, it must nevertheless answer for
its behaviour. We do so by discursively sharing the whole of significance
that guides our comportment. Heidegger calls this manner of justification
[Begründen] for displaying [Ausweisung]: ‘In such displaying, what occurs is
the referral to an entity that then makes itself known, for example, as
“cause” or as the “motivational grounds” (motive) for an already manifest
nexus of entities’ (GA, f/).
In line with this, Crowell has argued that Heideggerian conscience
constitutes ‘the origin of reason’ (, ). Crowell’s argument is,
roughly, that Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety and death shows that the
normative force of the activities in which I usually engage depends on me.
Once aware of this, I see that the solicitations that usually guide my
comportment are not simply factic causes to which I respond in a quasi-
mechanical way (, ). Rather, they ‘become subject to a choice for
which I am accountable’ (, ). In choosing a factical possibility and
thus making it a reason rather than a mere cause, Crowell argues that
Dasein becomes accountable to itself and to others (, ff ).
I agree with Crowell that conscience describes a fundamental form of
responsibility, but I disagree that this is best understood as a form of
accountability, that is, that it involves ‘a practice of discursive exchange in
which I owe an account of myself to others’ (, ). As I see it,
accountability requires that the agent is willing or capable of abandoning
his attitudes or altering his behaviour if they are found wanting. Thus,
I am accountable for φ-ing if and only if (a) I am willing to engage in a
process of explicit reasoning in which that which speaks for φ-ing is
weighted against that which speaks against φ-ing, and (b) I am willing to


See, for instance, Robert Pippin’s claim that Heidegger’s attempt to account for a ‘non-individualist,
non-mentalist account of our sensible, norm-governed dealings with the world’ is undermined by his
analysis of authenticity (Pippin , ). See also Tugendhat ().
 Politics and Authenticity
let this weighing determine whether or not I should φ. But as Heidegger
objects, ‘the idea of guilt must . . . be raised above the domain of concern
of bookkeeping [den Bezirk des verrechnenden Besorgens]’ (SZ, /).
The type of guilt that Heidegger has in mind is entirely independent of our
ability to list pros and cons. Moreover, accountability implies that I am in
control of my commitment so that I can simply change my attitude if the
justification turns out to be insufficient. Yet, Dasein is a null reason, and
this means, as we have seen, that Dasein never has power over its own
being ‘from the ground up’ (SZ, /). Dasein’s reasoning is, in other
words, never sufficient to determine the contingent project (the nullity)
that it is engaged in. No matter how long I weigh for and against φ-ing, my
choice can never be fully justified as it relies on a disposition that I do
not control.
What is the normative stance of conscience, if not one of accountability?
I believe that Heidegger’s point is better described as a form of attribut-
ability. Rather than describing the normative relation between an agent’s
commitments and the discursive space of reasons, attributability describes
the normative relation between the character of an agent and his or her
commitments as these are expressed in his or her behaviour or attitudes.
More formally, φ-ing is attributable to me if and only if φ-ing expresses a
commitment that is significant to who I take myself to be, where φ-ing is a
piece of behaviour. In this sense, attributability concerns self-referential
commitments, namely, the way in which an agent’s self-understanding (as
engaged in this or that project) prompts her to respond to certain envi-
ronmental affordances. Importantly, attributability flouts the control con-
dition inherent to accountability, since we might not be fully in control of
what we respond to in this way, and severs responsibility from the
intersubjective process of giving and asking for reasons, since we might
not be able to explain why we respond in the way that we do, but it


Crowell takes the fact that anxiety reveals ‘the normative force’ of innerworldly activities to depend
on us to be enough to satisfy this control condition: In anxiety, everyday activities confronts me as
‘something without normative force’, and this, in turn, means ‘that factic grounds become subject to
a choice for which I am accountable’, that is, a choice in which I gain ‘responsibility for the
normative force’ (, f, ). But this cannot be right for two reasons. First, when anxiety
ceases, and the world becomes normatively significant once again, it seems to me that this happens
globally in the same way that the onset of anxiety caused a global breakdown of meaning. If this is
indeed the case, anxiety does not allow us to pick and choose which activities are most important to
us. Second, being a mood, anxiety is independent of human cognition and volition. As such, it
remains beyond our control. Accordingly, anxiety reveals normative force to depend on us but not to
be controlled by us.
 The Demand for Authenticity 
remains an important normative arena since our self-understanding is at
stake in a way that can succeed or fail.
The distinction between accountability and attributability is important
because there is a normatively significant ground between the extremes of
Crowell’s ‘quasi-mechanical conformism’ and full-blown accountability
(, ). Thus, I might care for φ-ing without being able to explain
why, without being able to ground my commitment to φ in any evaluative
reasons. Yet, by virtue of my caring, my relation to φ-ing is fundamentally
different than my relation to quasi-mechanic responses like that of scratch-
ing my nose. To borrow an example from David Shoemaker (),
I might care for a person even if everything speaks against it and everyone –
including me – agrees that the person is a jerk. We might say I have an
inexplicable soft spot for the person in question. In such cases, I am
responsible for my attitude in the sense that it is attributable to me but
I am not accountable for it.
The idea of thrownness entails that some of my commitments are
grounded in a way that remains beyond the space of reason. In the end,
my ability to give an account of myself will always fall short of this basic
fact. For this reason, Heidegger insists that ‘conscience discourses solely
and constantly in the mode of keeping silent’ (SZ, /), that it
summons Dasein ‘into the reticence of itself’ (SZ, /). But this does
not render my commitments normatively insignificant. The fact that there
are no ultimate justifying grounds for my commitments means, as
Wrathall () argues, that I must assume or attribute to myself that
grounding function. When the actions of someone cannot be accounted
for by reference to universally valid and, therefore, impersonal reasons, we
must either attribute it to no one in particular (which leaves us with the
lack of responsibility characteristic of Anyone-norms [SZ, /]) or we
must attribute it the agent. In the latter case, the agent becomes the
reason for the action, because any successful attempt to make sense of
the action must refer to the agent and who they take themselves to be.
Wrathall writes:


Let me clarify a possible misunderstanding. I do not suggest that authenticity is a prerequisite for
self-referential commitments. As we have seen, some self-referential commitments are commitments
by default. In these cases, the corresponding action is not attributable to the particular agent as such
but only attributable to the Anyone or, technically speaking, to the Anyone-self (SZ, /; cf.
Boedeker ). I also do not suggest that individual or joint commitments as discussed in
Chapter  presuppose that the agents in question are authentic. I take this to be too demanding.
My suggestion is simply that our capacity for authenticity, as evidenced in the phenomenon of
conscience, goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of attributability.
 Politics and Authenticity
If in deciding my existence, there were always fully adequate reasons for my
having the dispositions that I do, or pursuing the possibilities of existence
that I do, then we could eliminate me as a reason for what I do by invoking
the reasons that moved me. But if my being who I am is a necessary
background to making sense of what I do, then my actions are necessarily
constituted by the fact that they are my actions. (Wrathall , )
So, rather than rendering Dasein accountable for its choices, conscience
demands that our choices become attributable to us. We now see that
φ-ing is attributable to me if and only if I am self-referentially committed
to φ-ing so that it is necessary to refer to who I am in order to make sense
of my φ-ing. I hence agree with Gary Watson () that attributability is
a ‘self-disclosure view’ of responsibility.
When Heidegger in ‘On the Essence of Ground’ argues that human
finitude makes the why-question possible, he does not mean that authen-
ticity requires full accountability. Rather, in order to understand his
account of justification [Begründung] as a form of displaying
[Ausweisung], we must bear in mind that the term Ausweisung, when used
as a reflexive verb [sich ausweisen], means to reveal oneself or to prove one’s
identity. Similarly, when he describes such ‘displaying’ as the way in which
an entity makes itself known ‘as “cause” or as the “motivational grounds”
(motive) for an already manifest nexus of entities’ (GA, f/), it is
crucial that we remember that any ‘manifest nexus of entities’ is anchored
in a for-the-sake-of. Accordingly, to answer the why-question is not for an
agent to offer sufficient, explicit, impersonal, and evaluative reasons but to
point to the holistic network of relations that makes the agent who she is.
In line with the interpretation of discourse, this ‘displaying’ of who the
agent is can be both linguistic and gestural. What matters is that the agent
discloses who she is by displaying the project to which she is committed.
We are now able to discern Heidegger’s solution to the attributability
problem and how it connects with his solution to the volatility problem.
Being-towards-death solves the volatility problem because it is a constitu-
tive possibility that runs through all our factical projections as a structural
feature. It thereby provides a being-possible that affords each Dasein with a
form of constancy in an otherwise volatile world. This sense of self does
not, however, come with any norms, and it is therefore too minimal to live
by. Rather, what happens when Dasein grasps its own being-towards-death


Watson mainly discusses attributability as an ethical category, but as Wrathall () has argued the
attributability inherent to authenticity extends to the domain of existence as such. I discuss the
relation between authenticity and moral responsibility further in Section ..
 The Demand for Authenticity 
is that it ontically realises what it already understands ontologically,
namely, that it is existence is bound to its being-in-the-world. This means
that it must live its life with reference to the possibilities afforded to it by
its being along things and with others. It now understands both that there
is no security from the fragility and volatility that follows from its two-
directional ontological dependency and that it – as emphatically individ-
uated through being-towards-death – is nonetheless capable of enduring
this ontological insecurity. In anticipation, Dasein achieves the constancy,
steadiness, and stability [Ständigkeit] lacking in the ‘non-self-constancy’
[Unselbst-ständigkeit] characteristic of fallenness (SZ, /).
Turning to the normative dimension of authenticity, conscience appeals
to our existential guilt – the fact that we must live one life at the expense of
all others – and demands that we assume responsibility for this contin-
gency. I have argued that this type of responsibility requires that we come
to acknowledge that who we are depend on the things that we care about.
Conscience thereby establishes a normative relation between my ownmost,
inalienable, and unsurpassable possibility and the factical possibilities in
which I am thrown. It requires me to assume responsibility for – to
attribute to myself – these fragile, factical possibilities. This is what
Heidegger calls resoluteness. Resoluteness does not require me to commit
to a particular set of first-order beliefs and actions; rather, it requires me to
commit to my first-order beliefs and actions whatever they are. Formulated
differently, resoluteness is the second-order attitude according to which the
first-order possibilities of being that I may not control nonetheless disclose
who I am.
Through attributability as resoluteness, we get a normatively rich sense
of ourselves because we now ‘choose’ certain of our factical possibilities;
we ‘choose’ that these are the possibilities that matter to us the most and
therefore define who we are. The mismatch between the possibilities
that I attribute to myself and the sense of self reflected back to me from
the possibilities that I happen to respond to (like that of yelling at
other motorists) explains our fairly common experiences that we do
something that is out of character, that does not integrate with who we
take ourselves to be.
In Heidegger’s parlance, ‘the constancy of the self’ involves not only
the ‘steadiness’ of living through different existential projections but
also the ‘steadfastness’ [Standfestigkeit] of ‘having taken a stand’


Resoluteness is ‘the choosing to choose a kind of being-one’s-self’ (SZ, /) and the ‘reticent self-
projection upon one’s ownmost being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety’ (SZ, /).
 Politics and Authenticity
[Standgewonnenhabens] on what matters to us (SZ, /). Thus,
authenticity amounts to what in Heidegger’s German is called Selbst-
ständigkeit. This term usually means independence or self-sufficiency,
but the hyphenation suggests that we should hear this term both as the
constancy [Ständigkeit] of the self that endures the volatility of the world
and the autonomy [Selbstständigkeit] of the self that commits itself to or
attributes to itself a factical way of existing (SZ, /).
To summarise, anticipation is the proper or transparent way of com-
porting oneself to the ontological feature of being-towards-death. In
anticipation, we ontically understand that we are ontologically individu-
ated by a possibility that runs through volatile world configurations.
Likewise, resoluteness is the proper or transparent way of comporting
oneself to the ontological fact of conscience. In resoluteness, we ontically
understand that we ontologically must be our factical possibilities, that is,
that our individuation always takes place in relation to things and other
people. Therefore, anticipatory resoluteness – Heidegger’s final formula for
authenticity – amounts to an emphatic individuation in which we ontically
understand who or what we already are, ontologically speaking.

. Authenticity and Being-With

Against any crude existentialism, Heidegger repeatedly insists that his
notion of authenticity does not contradict his claim that Dasein is what
it is by virtue of the shared world: ‘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?’ (SZ, /); ‘Even resolutions remain dependent upon the
“Anyone” and its world. The understanding of this is one of the things
that a resolution discloses, inasmuch as resoluteness is what first gives
authentic transparency to Dasein’ (SZ, /f ). Indeed, if authenticity
is emphatic individuation, authenticity makes us acutely (but not neces-
sarily explicitly) aware that our lives are inherently interwoven with that
of others, that our intentional states holistically depend not only on
ourselves, not only on the things around us but also on other intentional
creatures. In short, authenticity makes us acutely aware that we are
triangulating creatures.
Social ontology is an essential part of fundamental ontology, and since
authenticity is methodologically important for fundamental ontology, it
must be equally important to social ontology. But occasionally, Heidegger
 The Demand for Authenticity 
also suggests that authenticity plays another and more prominent role in
social life. Perhaps it not only discloses our relations to others for what they
are but also requires that we relate to others in a particular way. He says,
for instance, that the available ‘content’ of the world and ‘the circle of
others’ remains the same as in inauthenticity, but that in authenticity the
‘understanding and concernful being towards the available and the
solicitous being with others are now determined in regards to their own-
most potentiality-for-being-selves’ (SZ, /). A little later, an even
more puzzling paragraph claims that ‘when Dasein is resolute, it can
become the “conscience” of others’ and that ‘only in the authentically
being-a-self of resoluteness does the authentic being-with-each-other
emerge’ (SZ, /). Finally, certain passages indicate that the demand
to become authentic is not simply an obligation that each Dasein has to
him- or herself but also to others:
What is important is only whether the existent Dasein, in conformity with
its existential possibility, is original enough still to see the world that is
always already unveiled with its existence, to verbalise it, and thereby to
make it emphatically visible for others. (GA, /)
Extrapolating from these passages, it seems that authenticity not only
demands that we understand ourselves authentically but also that we
understand others authentically and, perhaps even, that we have an obli-
gation to helps others become authentic.
I want, in closing, to discuss these – admittedly rather casual – remarks
about the relation between authenticity and being-with. I think the
passages just cited involve two analytically separate issues, and I’ll discuss
these one by one. The first concerns the question: What does the idea of
attributability entail for our relations to others? The second issue is more
general and concerns the particular type of normativity embodied in the
demand to be authentic: Does authenticity imply an obligation to help
others become authentic, to become ‘the conscience of others’?

.. Attributability, Solicitude, and Community

Heidegger’s discussion of authenticity focuses mainly on Dasein’s relation
to itself. Yet, drawing on the above exposition, we can see how it also
affects Dasein’s relation to other Dasein. If the capacity to attribute
attitudes and actions to a self characterises the being of Dasein, and if
authenticity requires Dasein to grasp its own relations to other Dasein, it
seems that the authentic Dasein must also grasp its relation to other Dasein
 Politics and Authenticity
as defined by their capacity for attributability. It seems, then, that authen-
ticity demands not only that I see myself as ‘being a reason’ but also that
I understand others as such loci of responsibility.
This does not mean that authenticity is an ethical category. As I argued
briefly in Section ., it neither maps on to the (quasi-)Kantian distinction
between treating others as mere means or as ends nor requires us to be
altruistic. My discussion also shows that authenticity, in contrast to most
ethical categories, is not action-guiding. It neither requires nor prohibits a
specific course of action but demands a particular second-order attitude –
an attitude of self-commitment – towards such first-order actions and/or
attitudes. The possibility of authenticity is inherent to the being of Dasein.
Therefore, it must also affect how I see my fellow Dasein: I must see their
actions and attitudes as expressions of a ‘choice’ made by a steady and
steadfast self rather than as having no bearing on who they are. As
Heidegger writes with reference to death, ‘it makes Dasein, as being-
with, have some understanding of the potentiality-for-being of others’
(SZ, /)
If we did not see other people as loci of responsibility, it would be
impossible to grasp other people’s characters through their actions, and
this would seriously undermine our practices of holding each other
responsible. Instead of actions, we would see mere behaviour, and instead
of agents (with their ‘being-a-reason’), we would see deterministic
processes.
One might object that this lowers the bar for what counts as authen-
ticity, and that it thereby contradicts Heidegger’s claim that authenticity is
an ‘unsatisfiable demand’ [phantastische Zumutung] (SZ, /). In
reply to this, we should note two things. First, Heidegger often remarks
that authenticity makes possible a range of everyday practices although
these obscure the true significance of authenticity. With reference to
conscience, he writes that ‘whenever we see something wrongly, some
injunction as to the primordial “idea” of the phenomenon is revealed along
with it’ (SZ, /) and that ‘even the ordinary experience of conscience
must somehow – pre-ontologically – reach [the primordial] phenomenon’
(SZ, /). The ontological structures that are ontically understood in
authenticity are still operative in inauthenticity although they are not
recognised as such. Similarly, the capacity for authenticity underlies what
we with reference to Strawson might call the participatory perspective that
we adopt on each other in interpersonal understand and in shared actions
although these activities do not require us to be fully authentic. Second,
my suggestion that attributability is an aspect of authenticity does not by
 The Demand for Authenticity 
itself contradict the claim that the latter is an ‘unsatisfiable demand’.
Rather, we might read this claim as arising from the paradox between,
on the one hand, the demand that we must assume responsibility for our
factical possibilities – a demand with no apparent limits – and, on the
other hand, the fact that many everyday activities function precisely
because, not despite, the fact that we partake in them by default, just like
anyone would (cf. SZ, /).
Another advantage of my interpretation is that it connects nicely with
Heidegger’s elliptical discussion of authentic solicitude. Rather than des-
ignating whether we relate to others as mere things or as Dasein, the
distinction between leaping-in and leaping-ahead concerns the way in
which we ontically understand an entity that we already ontologically
understand as a fellow Dasein. As we recall, leaping-in ‘takes over for the
other that with which he is to concern himself’, so that ‘he can either take
it over as something finished and at this disposal, or disburden himself of it
completely’ (SZ, /f ). If I take over the activity that you concern
yourself with and simply offer it to you as a finished product, I tacitly
disregard your potentiality-for-being and deny you the possibility through
which you would achieve your sense of self as the one for whom this
possibility is significant. This is not to say that I disregard your ontological
status as Dasein, but simply that I fail to interact with you as a locus of
responsibility, as someone whose sense of self is at stake in their projects.
Imagine, for example, an aspiring carpenter who starts new projects around
the house in his spare time, but that his father-in-law drops by and finishes
the projects while he himself is at work. In such a case, the imprudent
father-in-law effectively denies the amateur carpenter the self-
understanding that he desires because he denies him the possibility of
doing carpentry.
Leaping-ahead, on the other hand, is an authentic form of solicitude
because it does not ‘take away the care’ of the other but rather ‘give[s] it
back to him authentically as such for the first time’ (SZ, /f ). This is
‘authentic care’ [die eigentliche Sorge] because it relates to the other not as
the ‘what with which he is concerned’; rather, ‘it helps the other to become
transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it’ (SZ, /f ).
Leaping-ahead resists the temptation to understand the other solely in
terms of the innerworldly activities that he is engaged in; that is, it resists
the temptation to volatilise his self and to see him as incapable of attrib-
uting projections to himself. Instead, leaping-ahead allows the other to
become ontologically transparent to himself, which is to say that it allows
him adopt an ontologically adequate second-order attitude on his own
 Politics and Authenticity
care. Formulated in first personal terms, this means that I attribute to you
not only the first order attitude of the project, ‘you φ’, but also the second
order attitude according to which you attribute this project to yourself,
‘φ-ing is normatively significant to you because φ-ing makes you who you
are’. Thereby it acknowledges that the other’s sense of self is bound to his
innerworldly activities in a way that the other has potentially chosen. To
leap-ahead of the other is to interact with the other in a way that respects
the other’s self-referential commitments.
If I am right that leaping-ahead allows the other to have a normatively
enriched self-understanding because it frees the other for his caring
engagement with the world, Heidegger’s analysis is closer to Hegel’s
dialectic between Lordship and Bondage than Kant’s means/end-
distinction. Although Heidegger ultimately opposes the Hegelian idea that
self-consciousness is the awareness of another’s awareness of oneself, they
agree on the basic anti-Cartesian point that the human mind is funda-
mentally related to both its environment and to other minds. We now see
that there is a further similarity in their respective accounts of how a self
becomes autonomous [selbstständig].
In Hegel, after the death struggle, the lord subjects his competitor to
bondage, and the bondsman becomes the mediator between the lord and
the object of his desire. Insofar as the bondsman works on the objects
around them and prepares them for the lord to devour, the lord loses touch
with the world and becomes wholly dependent on the bondsman. The
bondsman, on the other hand, realises that he himself is a form of
negativity because he is capable of permanently altering these independent
things. ‘It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes
to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence
[Selbstständigkeit]’ (Hegel, /). This means that, in the end, the lord
is alienated from his own nature, while the bondsman ‘becomes conscious
of who he truly is’ through his work (Hegel, /). Using Heidegger’s
terminology, the bondsman leaps-in for the lord and ‘takes over . . . that
with which he is to concern himself’ in such a way that the lord becomes
‘dominated and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and
remains hidden from him’ (SZ, /f ). The bondsman, by contrast,
achieves a normatively significant sense of self. As we have seen, this
requires that an agent realises that he is ‘a nullity’ (Heidegger) or a ‘pure
negativity’ (Hegel) capable of transforming the world through his care
(Heidegger) or formative activity [das formierende Tun] (Hegel (/)
because only then can he recognise himself in the world; only then can he
attribute actions in the world to himself.
 The Demand for Authenticity 
Attributability also relates to our being with others in another way. As
we saw in Chapter , Heidegger takes anonymous social normativity of the
Anyone to be inauthentic and what I have called historical social norma-
tivity to be authentic. We are now able to see that the problem with
Anyone-norms is that they refuse responsibility in the sense of
attributability:
The ‘Anyone’ is there alongside everywhere, but in such a manner that it
has always stolen away whenever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because
the ‘Anyone’ presents every judgment and decision as its own, it
deprives the particular Dasein of its responsibility [Verantwortlichkeit].
(SZ, /)
When Dasein operates under the guise of the Anyone, it discloses the
world in accordance with socially typified possibilities to which it is
committed by default rather than by choice. This entails that its behaviour
no longer discloses its particular self, that its behaviour is not attributable
to it. ‘This being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely
into the kind of being of “the others”’ (SZ, /). It thereby
leads to ‘inauthenticity’ and a ‘lack of autonomy or steadfastness’
[Unselbstständigkeit] (SZ, /). Under the guise of the Anyone, my
behaviour does not disclose who I am but who anyone or no one is.
Historical social normativity involves ontological transparency and attri-
butability. This is why he claims that there is an authentic counterpart to
the inauthenticity of the Anyone (e.g., SZ, /). Historical social
normativity involves a degree of ontological transparency because it, as we
have seen, requires that we grasp history ‘emphatically’ (SZ, /) and
see the social norms that we live by for what they are. Whereas the Anyone
presents social norms as universal defaults, historical social normativity
requires that we recognise them as the contingent product of a specific
community. Moreover, once authentic Dasein realises that a specific set of
social norms are contingent rather than necessary, it can choose whether to
commit to them (SZ, /). What is thus chosen is not something
new; as we saw, the choice is a repetition (SZ, /). Repetition, to be
precise, is the ontologically transparent second-order attitude towards a set
of contingent, socially inflected possibilities.
This historical repetition amounts to a specific form of attributability. In
repetition, I not only attribute something to me as an individual but to us
as a community. Individual fate and communal destiny are normatively
tied together (SZ, /). This does not mean that the authentic
individual is suddenly able to define what the community is, that
 Politics and Authenticity
authenticity demands that the individual makes him- or herself the
spokesperson of the entire community. It simply means that the authentic
individual realises that some of his or her commitments depend on other
people in the sense that they will fail if these other people are not similarly
committed. In Section ., I called this communal commitments.
Communal commitments amount to a specific form of attributability
because they attribute something to us as a community in a way that
makes my commitment dependent on the commitments of the rest of the
group members. The authentic Dasein is aware of this dependency, and
thus also aware that communal commitments make it particularly vulner-
able to the objections and reactive attitudes of its fellow community
members. If the others express (linguistically or through their behaviour)
that they are not committed in the way I believe that they are, I must make
them comply (through, for example, emotional contagion or through a
linguistic justification) or abandon the communal commitment entirely.
Both authentic and inauthentic Dasein live in conformity to social
norms but only the former realise their nature. Accordingly, Dasein only
understands the nature of its own and others’ commitment to activities
and norms because it can be authentic.

.. The Conscience of Others

It is one thing to claim that the commitments of an individual might
depend on those of others and that the individual, therefore, has an
interest in persuading these others to sustain their commitments. It is
another thing to claim that an individual has a general obligation to help
others realise what their own true nature is, including how this relates to
their commitments. Nonetheless, Heidegger suggests the latter when he
claims that resolute Dasein ‘can become the “conscience” of others’
(SZ, /) and that authentic Dasein must not only unveil its own

Recent commentators (Schmid ; Stroh ; Thonhauser ; Weichold ) have
suggested that Heidegger’s concept of authenticity provides a critical resource for rethinking social
norms and thus serves as a motor of social change. I agree that authenticity, as an ontologically
transparent second-order attitude on our own existence, will help us better understand the nature of
both social norms and our commitment to them. It is plausible that this sometimes helps bring
about social change. Yet, we should be careful in how we understand this connection, since there is
no straightforward conceptual relation between authenticity and social change. Authenticity is
neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for social change. You can be authentic in Heidegger’s
sense and remain indifferent to politics, on the one hand, and you can be an inauthentic social
activist, on the other hand. Perhaps some social activists are even better at bringing about social
change due to their inauthenticity, for example, if they understand themselves as vessels doing what
is necessary according to their god or according to the iron laws of history.
 The Demand for Authenticity 
existence as being-in-the-world but also ‘verbalise it’ and ‘make it emphat-
ically visible for others’ (GA, /).
Before we can say why we might be obliged to help others become
authentic, we must answer the more general question: Why should I
become authentic in the first place? Why is there a demand for authen-
ticity to begin with?
Let us start by examining the demand to be authentic in light of Kant’s
distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. Hypothetical
imperatives are conditional in the sense that they tell us how to act in order
to achieve a particular end: If you want B, do A! Categorical imperatives
are unconditional and must be obeyed in all circumstances: Do A! On the
Kantian model, moral responsibility stems from the categorical imperative
while other forms of practical normativity involve only hypothetical
imperatives. Social normativity would then take the form: If you want to
count as a member of G, you must do A!
But authenticity is neither a hypothetical nor a categorical imperative
for the simple reason that authenticity does not prescribe any particular
action. Crowell (, ) rightly notes that ‘appeal to authenticity
cannot help me choose between practical identities’. Instead of demanding
a particular action, authenticity demands a particular self-understanding.
We should note, however, that the self-understanding prescribed by
authenticity is unlike the self-understanding inherent to the activities of
everyday life – for example, the self-understanding of being a father or an
academic – because it does not demand that we understand ourselves
through a particular factical possibility. It demands that we understand
ourselves through our ownmost possibility, namely, the possibility of
being-in-the-world. This means that rather than prescribing a first-order
action or the first-order self-understanding inherent to a ‘practical iden-
tity’, authenticity demands that we adopt an ontologically adequate
second-order attitude towards our first-order actions and self-understand-
ings. Thus, it requires that we understand ourselves not in light of the
moral law but in light of the ontology of Dasein. Heidegger makes this
clear when he reinterprets ‘respect’, which for Kant motivates the subject
to follow the moral law, as ‘the ontical access to itself of the factically
existent authentic I. In this revelation of itself as a factically existent entity,
the possibility must be given for determining the constitution of the being


I thus agree with Golob according to whom authenticity ‘requires that one lives through, by, and for,
a certain self-understanding’ because it demands that an agent ‘make[s] sense of her life and world in
light of’ a full understanding of Dasein’s nature (, ).
 Politics and Authenticity
of the entity thus made manifest’ (GA, /). The demand is not
that we act in light of the moral law but that we become emphatically
individuated.
Since authenticity does not offer a competing ‘practical identity’,
Crowell believes that there is ‘no unconditional obligation to be authentic’
(Crowell , ). And the methodological significance of authenticity
does indeed seem to suggest that we should care about authenticity only if
we want to become philosophers. This would make the demand for
authenticity a conditional demand.
Yet, Golob (, ) rightly points out that Heidegger thinks that we
have no choice but to do philosophy. Therefore, philosophising is not a
‘practical identity’ among others but something that Dasein must engage
in by its very being:
Even if we explicitly know nothing about philosophy, we are already in
philosophy, because philosophy is in us and belongs to us, in the sense that
we are always already philosophising. . . . To exist as a human being means:
to philosophise. (GA, )
One way of reconstructing Heidegger’s reasoning is this: Existence always
involves self-understanding. Some self-understandings are better than
others, not in a moral sense, but in the sense that some self-understandings
simply provide us with a better understanding of the self. Most of the time,
we understand ourselves in terms of innerworldly entities and activities but
this is an inadequate way of understanding the self. Instead, Heidegger
argues that there is but one self-understanding that is wholly correct or
adequate. Unlike the first-order self-understandings of practical identities,
this is a second-order self-understanding that reflects the ontology of
Dasein. Dasein is, hence, always doing philosophy because Dasein neces-
sarily understands its own being, and philosophy is nothing but the on-
going process of making sense of ourselves, each other, and our world. As
he says, ‘philosophising is emphatic transcendence [ausdrückliches
Transzendieren]’ (GA, ), the coming to terms with our being-in-
the-world.
If Dasein by its very existence embodies a self-understanding, and if
Dasein’s mode of existence provides the measure for what constitutes a
good or a bad self-understanding, there is, pace Crowell, an unconditional
demand to be authentic because this demand for understanding oneself in
the right way is inherent to existence: ‘the obligation is planted in our
Dasein’ (GA, ); authenticity is something that Dasein ‘demands of
itself’ (SZ, /).
 The Demand for Authenticity 
As the demand to understand Dasein as Dasein, authenticity is at the
very heart of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In a sense, we can see it as his
particular interpretation of the Husserlian injunction that we go ‘back to
the things themselves!’ For Heidegger, this means that we must comport
ourselves to the ‘being of entities’ (SZ, /) – paradigmatically, to the
being of the entity that each of us is. But as our own being is by itself a
being-with, there also seems to be a, although slightly indirect, injunction
that we comport ourselves to the being of our fellow Dasein, that is, that
we also disclose them as Dasein. In other words, his commitment to the
project of phenomenology commits Heidegger to understand others in
light of their being. This means, among other things, to understand others
as having the possibility for authenticity, for becoming ontologically
transparent.
I take it that this is what Heidegger means when he says that Dasein
‘can become the “conscience” of others’ (SZ, /). Of course, we
cannot force others to become authentic as this requires them to adopt the
right self-understanding. As the conscience of others, we can only appeal to
what they already understand ontologically, not answer the appeal on their
behalf. The suggestion is, in short, that Dasein must comport itself
towards other Dasein as Dasein, and that this might inspire them to
cultivate their own inherent capacity for becoming authentic. This is a
non-political way in which the philosopher might become the leader or
guide [Führer] of others:
Guidance [Führerschaft] is the obligation to an existence that in some sense
understands the possibilities of human Dasein more fully and, in the end,
more originally and that becomes an exemplar by virtue of
this understanding. (GA, )


This is another point on which Heidegger’s politics failed in light of his own philosophy. He
assumed that the Jews (and the Americans and the Russians) were incapable of becoming
ontologically transparent.
 Conclusion

In order to spell out Heidegger’s social ontology, I have presented a range

of arguments – some direct and some indirect – in support of his claims
that human mindedness and agency are intrinsically embedded within a
shared world and that the shared world constitutes the most basic form of
intersubjectivity. In conclusion, I will review these arguments one
last time.
Starting with the indirect arguments of a more methodological charac-
ter, Heidegger takes issue with the idea that sociality constitutes a distinct
domain of the world. Given the phenomenological fact that all physical
entities appear in relation to other people by simply being publicly
available, how are we to distinguish between the social world and the
natural world? According to Heidegger, there is no neat way of doing so,
and we are forced to accept that sociality is an irreducible dimension of the
world. In a related way, Heidegger rejects any attempt to explain human
sociality as a distinct layer of reality that is derived from a more funda-
mental layer, that is, a layer of constituted objectivity or of brute nature.
Any such layer ontology borrows basic premises from an occurrent ontol-
ogy, and this will, ultimately, distort the phenomenological evidence. After
all, we do not typically encounter pure objects or brute facts but tools,
artefacts, and other people going about doing their business.
In a more direct fashion, Heidegger shows that a range of important
social phenomena all presuppose a pre-reflective and holistically structured
engagement with the shared world. These arguments concern specific types
of Dasein’s intentionality. We have, for instance, seen Heidegger argue
that social cognition is not simply dyadic; that it is not simply the way in
which a subject has another person as his or her intentional object whether
this intentional relationship is described as a form of theory-like inference,
a form of simulation, or as a perception-like act of empathy. Although he
agrees with other phenomenologists that our understanding of others is
immediate and requires a robust self/other-distinction, he argues that

 Conclusion 
interpersonal understanding requires that we understand the other as being
constitutively related to the same environment as us. The success of
interpersonal understanding must, in other words, be measured by
whether we get a good interpretative fit between the other’s behaviour
and the shared world in the sense of a matrix of salience.
Drawing on this model of interpersonal understanding, it is possible to
reconstruct a Heideggerian account of shared action. Rather than under-
standing shared action as the result of a complex of interrelated mental
states, we must, following Heidegger, conceive it as a form of triangulation
in which a worldly solicitation refers not simply to an individual agent but
a group of agents. In this way, I have argued that the shared world allows
us to account for a variety of shared actions depending on whether a given
solicitation requires joint goals, joint commitments, or both.
Heidegger also offers an interpretation of social norms that similarly
point to the importance of the shared world. That we see environmental
objects as tools with a proper use – for example, that we see this thing with
a weighted head fixed to a long handle as a hammer – and people as
members of a specific community testifies to the fact that we comport
ourselves in accordance with a largely non-thematic and socially inflected
whole of relations. Although such social norms do not exhaust our capacity
to understand entities, they certainly tend to shape our ways of acting and
judging in more or less opaque ways.
Finally, Heidegger directly argues that Dasein’s intentionality in general
presupposes a form of intersubjectivity. Unconcealment, as he would put
it, is by itself shared because the entities disclosed in it are delivered over to
what he calls ‘mutual use’. The idea is that although we always intend an
object, a, in respect to a particular usage, b, we are also non-thematically
aware that the same object can also be intended in respect to other
potential usages, b. . .n. Phrased differently, the possibility of different
polarisations of the same field of entities is inherent to human being-in-
the-world. Multiple existential selves – with different in-order-to’s and for-
the-sake-of’s – can in principle subject the same entities to different
existential projections, and when multiple existential selves do so, they
inevitably affect each other’s existential projections. Whether we like it or
not, we are constitutively engaged in a triangulation between ourselves,
objects, and others. Being-in-the-world is by transcendental necessity what
relates and separates us.
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 Index

a as b-structure, –, , , ,  and the Anyone, –
as responsive to others, , , , –, definition of, –
,  autonomy, , –
lacking in animals, –,  averageness, , , 
PCI on, –, 
absorption,  Beauvoir, Simone de, 
accountability, –, See also attributability Befindlichkeit. See affectivity
action, , –,  being-towards-death, , , –, ,
joint, , –,  –
shared, –, –, , ,  and demise, –
affectivity, ,  and perishing, –, 
affordance, –, , , –, –, being-with, , , , –
, See also goal; in-order-to relation and authenticity, –
joint, –, – and discourse, –
alterity, –, , – as essential agreement, –
America, –, –, –,  concept of, –
animal rationale, , –,  transcendental status of, , , , –,
animality, , –, ,  –, , 
animism,  Biles, Simone, 
anticipation, , – Bird, Larry, 
antisemitism. See Judaism Blattner, William, , , –
anxiety, , –, –, – body. See embodiment
Anyone, the, –, –, –, –, Bratman, Michael, , –, –, ,
–, , , , , , See also 
pragmatic conventionalist interpretation, Buber, Martin, , 
the; social normativity: anonymous
and externalism, – camping trip, example of the, –, 
as drift towards social coherence, –, care, –, , , , , , –,
–,  , –, –
Arendt, Hannah, ,  Carman, Taylor, , , , –, , , ,
argument from analogy, –, , , , , –, , –,
 , –
Aristotle, ,  Carr, David, 
atomism, , , –,  Cartesianism, –, –, , , ,
attributability, , –, –, –, , 
–, See also accountability collective intentionality, –, –, , ,
authenticity, –, , –, –, , –, , , –, 
, , –, , –, collectivism, , –
– commitment, –, , –, –,
and intersubjectivity, – , , See also for-the-sake-of relation
and social change,  by default, , , , , 


 Index 
communal, –, –, , fellow Dasein, , –, , , , , ,
–,  , –, , See also interpersonal
Gilbert’s notion of, – understanding
joint, –, , – football, 
Schmid’s notion of, ,  for-the-sake-of relation, –, , –,
conscience, , –,  , –, See also commitment
of others, , – fragility, –, , 
constitution, –, – Fried, Gregory, 
in Husserl, –, – Fug. See dikē
convention, –, –, , –, , , , Führerprinzip, –, –
–, –,  Fürsorge. See solicitude
Crowell, Steven, , , , , –,
, , –, – Gadamer, Hans-Georg, , , 
Gelassenheit, 
dancing, , ,  genetic problem, the, , 
das Man. See Anyone, the geopolitics, , , , –, 
Dasein, concept of, , –,  Gerede. See idle talk
as individual or collective,  Germany, , –, –, –
Davidson, Donald, , , – Gestell. See en-framing
death. See being-towards-death Gilbert, Margaret, –, , , –,
Derrida, Jacques, , ,  –, 
Descartes, Rene. See Cartesianism goal, , , , , –, , –,
destiny, , –, , , , –, , , See also affordance;
 in-order-to relation
developmental psychology, , ,  Golob, Sacha, , , , , 
dikē, –, – Greece, , , 
discourse, –, –, – Guignon, Charles, , –, , , 
distantiality, , –, ,  guilt, –, 
Dreyfus, Hubert, , , –, , , –,
–, –, , , , –, Habermas, Jürgen, , , 
 Hatab, Lawrence, 
dyadic relation, –, , –,  Haugeland, John, , , –, –,

education, –, , –,  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, , , ,
Eigentlichkeit. See authenticity –
embodiment, –, , –,  Heinämaa, Sara, –
empathy, , , –, –, See also heritage, –, 
interpersonal understanding; hermeneutics, –, –, –, , ,
transpositioning –, , , –
Heidegger’s critique of, – historicism, –, , –
special hermeneutics of, ,  history, , –, , –, –,
enactivism, , ,  –, See also social normativity:
en-framing, , , –,  historical; historicism
epoché, –, , See also constitution Hölderlin, Friedrich, –, 
Ereignis, , –, See also historicism holism, –, –, –, –, ,
existentialism, , ,  See also externalism; relativism
externalism, , –, –, –, See also and animality, 
holism and historicity, –
and natural kinds,  and relativism, , –
open-ended (or weak), , , , , and the differentiation condition, , , ,
 , , 
strong, ,  and the jointness condition, , ,

facticity, –, , ,  Husserl, Edmund, , –, –, , ,
fallenness, , –, ,  –, , , 
 Index
Husserl, Edmund (cont.) McManus, Denis, , 
and the critique of Heidegger, – McMullin, Irene, –, , –, , 
Heidegger’s critique of, , –, –, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, , –, 
– metapolitics, –, , –, –,
See also Nazism
idealism, , , , , , See also realism Mill, John Stuart, –, 
idle talk, , See also discourse Millikan, Ruth, 
inauthenticity, –, –, , mineness, , , , , See also authenticity;
–, –, , See also Anyone, care
the; authenticity Mitdasein. See fellow Dasein
individualism, , , , –,  Mitsein. See being-with
methodological,  mood. See affectivity
individuation, –, , , –,  mutual use, , , , , , 
as emphatic, –, –, –,
 Nancy, Jean-Luc, , 
most radical, – naturalism, –, –, , , , –
of the world,  Nazism, –, –, , , , ,
in-order-to relation, –, –, , , –, See also Germany; metapolitics
, See also affordance; goal Nietzsche, Friedrich, , , 
institutional facts, –, – normativity
intellectualism, , , ,  and acting in light of norms, , , 
intellectualist problem, the,  and morality, –
intentionality. See a as b-structure as inert, , –, 
intergenerationality, –,  as lacking in Heidegger, 
internalism, , –, –, , , , See in Dasein’s existence, 
also animality; externalism in shared action, –, –
interpersonal understanding, , , , See
also empathy; transpositioning O’Brien, Mahon, , 
Heidegger’s neglect of,  object-awareness, –, –, –, ,
problem of, ,  
introspection, , , , , ,  Okrent, Mark, , –, –, 
Olafson, Frederick, , –, –
Jemeinigkeit. See mineness open intersubjectivity, –, , , 
joint attention, , –, ,  order, historical. See dikē
Judaism, , –, – other-awareness (non-thematic), –, –,
See also interpersonal understanding
Kant, Immanuel, , , , , , , Overgaard, Søren, –, –
, –
people, concept of the, –, –, ,
Lafont, Christina, –, ,  –, –, –, –,
language. See discourse –, See also geopolitics; Germany;
layer ontology, , , , ,  metapolitics; social normativity: historical
leaping-ahead, –, –, See also polis, –
solicitude Polt, Richard, 
leaping-in, –, , See also solicitude power, –
levelling down, ,  pragmatic conventionalist interpretation, the,
Levinas, Emmanuel, , , , ,  –, –, , , , –, 
Lewis, David, –, – problem of other minds, the, –
Lipps, Theodor, –, – projection, , , –
Löwith, Karl, , , ,  psychologism, –, , , 
Ludwig, Kirk,  public, the, –

Malpas, Jeff, –, ,  Raffoul, François, 

Marchart, Oliver,  Rawls, John, 
Martin, Wayne, – realism, , , 
 Index 
recognition, , , , , ,  solicitude, –, –, –, See also
Rede. See discourse leaping-ahead; leaping-in; transpositioning
Reid, James, – solipsism, , , , 
relativism, , , –, , , –, See also Sorge. See care
holism; idealism Star Wars, 
repetition, –, , – state, the, –, , , –
resoluteness, –, –,  status function, –, 
respect,  Stein, Edith, , , –, –
reticence, ,  subjectivism, , , –
Rick and Morty,  subjectivity. See selfhood
Rorty, Richard,  surrounding world. See world, the: threefold
Russia, –, –, ,  conception of

Sánchez Guerrero, Héctor Andrés, ,  taxonomy problem, the, , –
Sartre, Jean-Paul, , , , , , , , , Taylor, Charles, 
 teleology. See goal
Schatzki, Theodore, , ,  temporality, –, –
Schear, Joseph, ,  tennis, –
Scheffler, Samuel,  The Gods Must Be Crazy, 
Scheler, Max, , –, –, – theory theory of mind, –, 
Schmid, Hans Bernhard, –, , –, Theunissen, Michael, , 
–, ,  Thomson, Iain, , , –
Schmitt, Carl,  thrownness, –, , , , ,
Schütz, Alfred, ,  –
Searle, John, –, –, –, , , , Tomasello, Michael, –
, – Tönnies, Ferdinand, –
Sein-zum-Tode. See being-towards-death transcendence, –, 
self-awareness. See selfhood and alterity, 
selfhood and intersubjectivity, –, 
and constancy, , , – in Husserl, –, –, –
and I, you, and we, , , , ,  transcendentalism, , –, –,
existential, –, , , , –, 
– late Heidegger’s rejection of, –, –
in action, – transpositioning, –, –
minimal, –, ,  triangulation, –, –, , , –,
plural, – –, , , , 
self-world. See world, the: threefold conception
of understanding, , –, , , , –,
Senegalese, example of the, –, – , , 
shared action. See action of being, , , , –, , –,
significance, –, , –, –, –, , –, , –,
 –, –, –, 
simulation theory of mind, –,  ontic, –
social cognition. See interpersonal understanding ontological, –, 
social normativity, , –, , ,  Uneigentlichkeit. See inauthenticity
anonymous, –, See also Anyone, the
historical, –, , , ,  van Buren, John, 
social ontology Verstehen. See understanding
and fundamental ontology, – volatility, –, –, –, 
and politics, –, –
restricted view of,  Weber, Max, , –
transcendental, , –,  Westerlund, Fredrik, , 
unrestricted view of, – with-world. See world, the: threefold conception
solicitation, –, , , , –, of
–, , , , ,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig, , , , –
 Index
world, the world sharing, , –, –, –, –,
a priori structure of, – –
concept of, – as distribution, 
threefold conception of, –, asymmetric, –
 Lafont on, 
world-building, –, , , See also PCI on, , 
transpositioning; world sharing Wrathall, Mark, , , , –, , 
worldlessness, , –, 
world-poverty, –, –, , See also Zahavi, Dan, , , , –, , , ,
animality 