Martin Heidegger · Philosophy
Most of the time we are not ourselves. We live as ‘one’ lives - doing what one does, thinking what one thinks, dispersed into an anonymous public Heidegger calls <em>das Man</em>, ‘the they.’ This everyday absorption (fallenness) lightens the burden of existence but at the cost of our own selfhood - until anxiety reveals the uncanny truth that we are not, after all, at home.
Heidegger asks a deceptively simple question: in everyday life, who is Dasein? We might answer: ‘myself, of course’ - each person is their own self. But Heidegger argues that this is precisely what is not true most of the time. In everyday existence, he claims, Dasein is not its own authentic self but an anonymous, public self he calls das Man - usually translated ‘the they’ or ‘the one’ (from the impersonal German man, as in ‘man sagt,’ ‘one says,’ ‘they say’). Consider how much of our lives is governed by what ‘one’ does and ‘they’ say. One dresses a certain way; one finds certain things shocking; one enjoys what one is supposed to enjoy; one holds the opinions one is supposed to hold. ‘They say’ the book is good, so we read it; ‘one’ does not do such-and-such, so we refrain. This anonymous ‘they’ is not any particular person - not you, not me, not anyone in particular - yet it rules our everyday existence, prescribing how to live, what to think, what to want. In our everyday being, Heidegger says, we are this they-self: dispersed into the anonymous public, living not as ourselves but as ‘one’ lives.
Heidegger describes the characteristic ways the ‘they’ operates, and they are uncomfortably recognizable. There is distantiality: in our everyday being-with-others we are constantly, if unconsciously, concerned with how we measure up to others, anxious about the ‘distance’ between ourselves and them, striving to be like them or to keep up. There is averageness: the ‘they’ maintains a constant pressure toward the average, the ordinary, the acceptable; it watches over every exception, every attempt to rise above or stand out, and quietly suppresses it. Anything original, unusual, or genuinely one’s own is suspect; one should not stand out. And there is leveling down (Einebnung): the ‘they’ levels all possibilities of being down to the average, flattening the exceptional and the profound to the ordinary and the manageable. Together these produce a powerful conformism - not imposed by any particular tyrant, but exercised by the anonymous public over each of us, and by each of us as part of the anonymous public. The ‘they’ also relieves us of responsibility through what Heidegger calls the ‘disburdening’ of Dasein: because ‘one’ does this, I need not decide for myself; because ‘they’ think that, I need not think for myself; because ‘everyone’ is responsible, no one in particular is responsible. The ‘they’ answers every question and takes every decision, so that I never have to.
Heidegger’s analysis of the ‘they’ matters because it diagnoses, with unmatched precision, a permanent and powerful temptation of human existence - and one that the modern world has intensified beyond anything Heidegger could have imagined. The pull of the ‘they’ is enormous because it is genuinely comfortable: it relieves us of the burden of existence. To live as ‘one’ lives is to be spared the anxiety of deciding for oneself, the responsibility of genuine choice, the difficulty of facing one’s own existence. The ‘they’ answers every question, prescribes every action, supplies every opinion ready-made; we need only go along, and we are disburdened, tranquillized, at ease. This is why the everyday absorption in the ‘they’ is not a rare failing but the default condition of human existence, the path of least resistance into which we constantly fall. But the comfort comes at a terrible cost: the loss of our own selfhood. In living as ‘the they,’ we are dispossessed of our own existence, dispersed into the anonymous public, never genuinely ourselves. We gain ease and lose authenticity. Heidegger’s analysis is not moralistic finger-wagging - he insists fallenness is structural and unavoidable as a baseline - but it is a profound diagnosis of the human condition and a summons: to recognize the seductive anonymity of the crowd for what it is, and to grasp that becoming genuinely oneself requires wresting one’s existence back from the ‘they.’ In an age of mass media, social conformity, viral opinion, and algorithmic distraction, the diagnosis has only grown more piercing.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Heidegger’s analysis of das Man (‘the they’), the anonymous public self we mostly live as, and of fallenness - our everyday absorption in idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Explain how the ‘they’ both relieves and dispossesses us, and what anxiety and uncanniness reveal.
Leads to Søren Kierkegaard.
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