Heidegger in lockdown

Martin Heidegger was not only a seminal figure in the Existentialist movement, but one of the most formidable and controversial thinkers of the last century. He heralded a revolution in the way we think about the world and our place in it. I aim firstly to introduce the reader to Heidegger’s philosophy of everyday, ordinary living, before discussing the multiple disruptions that Heidegger introduces into ordinary life. I will then argue that disruption must necessarily precede achieving authenticity in one’s life, and finish with a discussion of the place Heidegger’s existential philosophy can occupy in today’s world.

The preoccupation of existentialist thought is the problematic, uncertain and unnerving nature of our human existence. In this spirit, Heidegger describes the human as an ‘abyss’ and a ‘confusion’. Existentialism is, fundamentally, a critical anxiety with our place in the world—a restless re- examination of the architecture of reality that is routinely passed over, taken as ‘given’ in a comfortable complacency which deflects from and anaesthetises what is in essence a thin and fragile existence. We do not know why we are here; in fact, any kind of ‘why’ appears implausible: the universe is cold and indifferent. However, we also do not know what ‘being here’ really means. This is more than asking what exists: Heidegger denounces such an investigation as superficial, a mere cataloguing of the furniture of the universe. The question we must ask—a question that has allegedly been neglected since Plato—is what it is to exist. Rather than surveying what entities exist, this entails asking how entities are intelligible as entities. It probes into what being, as such, is. The aim of Heidegger’s writing, then, is to instil in his listeners a moment of astonishment at the foundations of existence: to open up again, for wonder and bewilderment, what is generally too close to be seen.

What tends to strike—and confound—the reader the most when tackling Heidegger is just how little sense he seems to make. His abstruse and esoteric style is especially offensive to those (such as Oxford students) who are trained to think clearly, rigorously—and above all, logically. ‘Analytic’ philosophers tend to hold that truth is a binary designation describing propositions, and determined by empirical observations together with logical terms and structures. The questions of philosophy can be compartmentalised into digestible chunks dealt with atomistically and, when these propositions are compiled together, will exhaust what can be observed about the world. The job of philosophers is to eke out painstaking, logical arguments to obtain scientific clarity about the way the world is. Any left-over, general questions or utterances that do not conform to the logical syntax are dismissed as vacuous. Logic, then, has the final say on the limits of philosophy: it dictates what can be said about the world, and what must be passed over in silence.

In contrast, philosophers on the continent found logical structures too constrictive to contain and fully account for the meaning of life as it is lived—as overwhelming, confusing and clamorous as it is.

Heidegger writes that it is not the “highest court of appeals”, and that “the very idea of ‘logic’ dissolves in a whirl of more basic questioning”. It is a certain denatured or ‘deficient’ scheme of things into whose rigid boundaries we try to coerce the richness of primitive, phenomenal experience—our most basic opening onto the world. It is the individual being’s openness onto the world that makes possible the derivative experience of looking or trying to see. As Heidegger puts it: “those who idolize “facts” never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light.” He insists that this theoretical mode of thought has seeped into our very language; that that language has congealed into a grammar entirely unsuited to the understanding of Being. So in order to properly elucidate his philosophical system, Heidegger must liberate the form and diction of his prose from his stifling native German. This is what motivates his bizarre linguistic concoctions and esoteric style: it is an attempt to reveal the hidden meanings and resonances of ordinary talk, to express things which could not otherwise be said.

Paying attention to how the world is disclosed to us as we live it rather than as we think it in the detached, sterilised cloisters of academia is the real business of philosophy. In this spirit, Heidegger strove to clear away the accrual of theoretical postulates and presuppositions amassed by the western philosophical tradition—and begin again. The Cartesian self, the isolated thinking ego extricated from its world, is not the place to begin. In its place, Heidegger invents the concept of Dasein. This means something like ‘human being’: the kind of being we humans have. Yet it is not necessarily embodied (does not necessarily have our biological form), and not necessarily consciousness (understood as the domain of pure mental activity). Dasein, then, is a designation of our kind of being stripped of the biological and mental baggage (our bodies and minds) bound up in the weightier term ‘human being’. Thus, it does not lean on any presuppositions. The most basic aspect of Dasein’s existence is the brute fact of our ‘being there’—the pure activity of existing. Dasein’s existence is also a self-interpretive activity: Dasein is the being for whom its own being is at stake or is an issue. This is what Heidegger calls ‘Being-in-the-world’. Any division of the unitary phenomenon being-in-the- world is mere convenient conceptual partitioning. Our being, and the world around us, form an indissoluble whole.

In this section I will sketch an outline of Heidegger’s account of the everyday being of Dasein as related in Part I of Being and Time. Reflecting his aversion to a constrictive logical approach to philosophy, Heidegger’s account of ordinary life is entirely at odds with the accounts articulated by mainstream Anglophone scholars. For Heidegger, the world of the everyday is not a system of representations occurrent to a contemplative subject, and is not occupied by autonomous, interest-maximising agents rationally deliberating about optimal actions and causally interacting with a separate external world. Rather than the primitive self being a thinking subject, it is a doing subject, already immersed in a meaningful world: a “bare subject without a world never “is” firstly, nor is it ever given”. The experience of everyday being is one of ‘absorbed coping’, or what we might otherwise term ‘fluid action’, and it is constructed and informed by public normativity or ‘das Man’.

In our everyday experience, we ‘cope’ with our immediate practical situation. Active coping means just our ‘getting on’ in the world. This concept involves both the way I act and the way the world shows up to me. My world is delimited by the scope of my concern; both the tasks I pursue, and the things around me I use to get them done (for example: tools, vehicles, clothes, or dwellings) function as the objects of my concern. The things I encounter in my everyday concern are called “equipment”: they afford some activity to Dasein and extend the possibility of action. Rather than showing up as objects in their own right, they show up as a ‘something-in-order-to’, assigned to a particular use. I am so absorbed in the practical situation that I do not see the hammer or nail, but only the for-hammering- with. What an item of equipment becomes is determined by which social practices it is deemed appropriate for, in terms of achieving a particular task. This lump of metal attached to a wooden rod I hold in my hand becomes a hammer because we deem it suitable for hammering.

However, the overwhelming multitude of possible actions at any one time would debilitate everyday active coping. Therefore fluid action requires that equipment not just passively affords action, but actively solicits it – that is, draws the agent into engaging with it, according to whether or not it serves the immediate task I pursue. So the world shows up as a shifting and richly interconnected field of solicitations, enclosed within the horizon of the task(s) at hand. When moving through the world we experience a string of invitations to act, held out by equipment, propelling us from one task to the next. I am immediately ready to cope with the things with which I have concernful dealings: I cope with a chair by sitting on it or skirting round it; I cope with a door by going through it. As Dreyfus put it, “we are masters of our world, constantly effortlessly ready to do what is appropriate”. No independent self can be discriminated from the seamless flow of action and communion with the world. This we normally call ‘being in the flow’.

To assume the theoretical attitude means to suspend our involvement in the world. It therefore entails a disruption of absorbed skilful coping. We only see objects when one’s fluid action breaks down. The division between subject and object is reinstated, and my way of encountering the object is not through manipulating it, but through cognition: pure mental content directed towards an object. What was just a node in a thread of beckoned interactions and uses is cemented into a discrete, bare object. Such an object has been severed from its surrounding milieu of functions and meanings; it is isolated and self-enclosed. This then permits me to observe its determinate properties and position in geometric space. I notice that the hammer is about x inches long and weighs about y grams; I notice that the wooden rod is painted red and the metal head is dull grey. But it bars me from fluid skilful interaction with it. The determinate object revealed by pure disinterested perception is merely an impoverished residue of the everyday practical world left over when action is inhibited. Heidegger writes: “the kind of dealing which is closest to us is... not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use.”

One possesses a background skill for coping appropriately with things like tables and chairs, which feeds into a fluid response to situations that in turn forms them as a person; this readiness, however, is governed by a subterranean network of social norms. The world around me is made intelligible because of socially defined ways of comporting oneself and coping with entities. Meaning resides not at the level of the perceiving or thinking subject, but at the level of shared practices. It is generated by the public mood, the anonymous mass—das Man. Das Man is not a collective body of individuals, but rather a kind of normative field for which the members of society are both its vehicles and its subjects—described by one scholar as a sort of “consensual hallucination”. Heidegger writes that ‘the who’ of everyday Dasein “is not this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all. The “who” is the neuter, the Anyone”.

For every culture there are equipmental norms and thus an average way to do things. In one culture one eats with cutlery; in a different culture one eats with chopsticks. I eat my food, drink my coffee, and walk to college in a way that conforms with social norms and hence is unobtrusive. If I were to develop an idiosyncratic new method of drinking coffee—say, a backhand manoeuvre—then my behaviour would obtrude itself: some people in the café would likely stop and stare. Norms determine the average and supply the normative ‘glue’ binding people to it. Averageness is the fixture that gives the social world an organising coherence, the basis of its mutual intelligibility—and is “that around which everything turns for das Man”. People will embody—and amplify—the same impulse towards levelling down and replicating the generic, average mode of comportment. We correct mispronunciations, we chastise poor table manners, and we might subtly signal when someone is ‘out of line’ in certain social situations by an embarrassed look or an awkward silence. In absorbed coping, when we are pulled along by the solicitations of a situation, we surrender ourselves to the normative flow of das Man. No reflective evaluation of available norms mediates, at a cognitive level, doing the appropriate action. Equipment gains its profile from the appropriate practices affixed to it by das Man; and the artefacts of the world are arranged so as to encourage the public interpretation of being.

The way we understand ourselves is also governed by das Man. Dasein’s kind of being is essentially self-interpreting activity; and selfhood for Heidegger is a way of existing, a certain attitude towards my existence. To have a self is to be tuned in to what matters and is at stake in a practical situation and to be able to forge ahead with some course of action that makes sense in terms of the way things matter. The self is just a particular concrete way of comporting oneself, of pressing forward or ‘projecting’ into the possibilities afforded by the world. My comportment and the way things matter are determined by the practical identity I pursue through the possibilities I project into. This practical identity is expressed in terms of the framework of ‘for-the-sakes-of-whichs’—the social roles we assign ourselves, such as being a student or parent or astronaut. These are the ultimate ends towards which all purposive action is directed.

Das Man supplies the stock of for-the-sake-of-whichs by which we understand ourselves. Even in diametric opposition to averageness, we still define ourselves by (negative) relation to publicly accepted ways of life—as a rebel or nonconformist. So then, “the public world governs every interpretation of the world and of Dasein”. As das Man discloses the totality of my world—‘making’ equipment, practices, and ways of understanding the self—it facilitates action as well as fettering it. Das Man determines both the way I act and the way the world shows up to me in my everyday concern. It is not merely repressive in its effects, but has a positive productive function as constitutive of the self—creating social cohesion and our shared meaningful world.

However, this leaves no primal space for the expression of a vital self in my actions or the way I comport myself. My self is not a cohesive whole and ineliminable unit that endures across disparate contexts. Social norms regulate a particular situation, and do so generically. As norms are local to a situation and not endowed to an individual across time, a self lost in das Man cannot be a coherent and consistent whole. Social norms construct the situation in crude and pre-packaged elements that, moreover, do not open the possibility of original or nuanced interpretation to the subtleties and singularities of what is a unique particular event. If I distil a reason for everything I do from what one ought to do—that is, from the public normativity of das Man—then under my own gaze I become nothing more than a site of innumerable intersecting social norms, colliding and coalescing, and any sense of ‘self’ dissolves. Constant preoccupation with ‘what one does’ in the immediate context means one’s actions are not the outward mark and realisation of one’s self, but merely a particular enactment of some generic rules. One’s life “is ‘lived’ by the common-sense ambiguity of that publicness in which nobody resolves upon anything but which has always made its decision”. The impersonality of average behaviour destroys my personality: “the particular Dasein has been dispersed into das Man, and must first find itself”. Moreover, Dasein’s answerability for its life vanishes—projected onto an everyone that is no one. Thus, the self, properly a cohesive and integrated whole, has been disrupted—in the most abrasive, shattering way.

Heidegger introduces a means to salvation—a route towards leading a more genuine, integral existence whilst still fluidly navigating the everyday world of das Man. A prerequisite, though, is the disruption of our everyday world through the experience of anxiety. It is only through anxiety—and subsequently guilt, another core concept for Heidegger—that we can embrace a more authentic life. Momentarily wrenching oneself out of the slumbers of everyday being can be emancipatory. Thus, disruption can be positive and productive—as well as deleterious to both the self and fluid absorbed coping.

Existential anxiety is a pervasive, gnawing feeling of being not at home, of being uncanny; it is the disruption and ensuing breakdown of one’s ability to be-in ‘our’ world. We lose ourselves in das Man to escape from such anxiety. In anxiety, fluid action, everyday coping, is disrupted in the most abrupt, wrenching manner: “anxiety thus 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”. Anxious moments strike when we gain a profound sense of the fragile foundations of existence; that the terminal collapse of one’s meaningful projects and so one’s world always impends. This incessant but vague and peripheral peril is death. Death in the Heideggerian sense is the “indeterminate certitude”, perpetually pressing itself upon us as a possibility: “death is, as the end of Dasein, in the being of this entity towards its end”. Death, the possibility of the end of my self, “individuates me down to myself”. There is nothing generic or average about it. It is only at this point that the enveloping normative force of das Man whimpers and dissipates.

Existential anxiety opens us up to experiencing existential guilt. My self is nothing other than the possibilities I project into; but the choice of which possibilities to project into does not issue from the deliberative activity of a fully-constituted human agent. It cannot be so, for the self is constituted by the particular possibilities it projects into. Indeed Dasein “constantly lags behind its possibilities”. We do not have free reign over which possibilities to project into, and this lack of choice Heidegger calls ‘thrownness’. My world is lit up in a particular way, pulling me towards certain ways of coping with my environment, because I just am the bundle of dispositions and traits that I am thrown into; and my thrownness determines the roles, purposes and ends I adopt. Therefore, my thrownness determines ‘me’. Because of this, who I am and what I do are ultimately not grounded in anything grander than the simple fact that I am who I am. There is no external justification for me being who I am—for my existence. An explanatory or justificatory account will (if elaborated far enough) have to terminate at the fact of me being me. “Dasein is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis”. I suffer existential guilt when I acknowledge the lack of reasons for being the particular person that I am.

I cope with guilt by choosing to make my thrownness mine. While I may have been thrown into my concrete possibilities, I must embrace them and commit to them as my own nonetheless—and do so in solemnity and earnestness. This thereby constitutes a choice: the choice of myself. In seizing my projects as an active choice, I make them truly mine. Even if my outwardly observed actions do not change at all, I recognise that I cannot appeal to the normative guidelines of das Man to warrant them, to secure them. I stand alone, bearing the full weight of my morally significant actions upon my own shoulders. Once I acknowledge the ineliminable and ultimate role my own self plays in the production of my actions, and that public norms are a crude, local and brittle framework for action unable to invest my actions with any greater legitimacy, I am free to take responsibility for the possibilities I project into and commit myself more fully to them; and am more flexible and attuned in how I navigate the world of das Man. As the situation changes and as one’s attunements alter, I can adapt and change with the situation. That is, I am open to the vulnerability of existence.

Through guilt and anxiety towards death, the possibilities I project into are thrown into sharp relief against their radical fragility, ungroundedness and contingency. I am no longer ensnared by public normativity and engrossed in the situation at hand. Being acutely aware of both the complete indebtedness of my projective self to my factical origins, and its complete vulnerability to death, brings the whole of Dasein—that is, the full range of Dasein’s existential possibilities—into view. I perceive my possibilities as so many interlocking threads making up my life understood as a composite whole. I marry the practical identity I pursue, and hence the possibilities I press into, with the way I am thrown into the world. I distil those possibilities that still matter against the immediate possibility of death from the distracting possibilities impressed upon me by das Man. This gives me a limited jurisdiction over the concrete situation into which I am thrown. That is, I can change the circumstances of my existence—within limits.

In committing myself to my possibilities anyway, despite being aware of their outward arbitrariness and fragility, I gain an authentic self. Thus, in authenticity I am a consistent and coherent whole and an ineliminable unit because the way I have been made and the way I understand myself—who I am and who I want to be—are consonant with one another, established in a mutual sensitivity. My thrown self and my projected self are integrated into a unified whole. Heidegger calls this integration of the elements of the self “taking a stand”. If we remain absorbed in everyday being then we suffer a disruption of the self, its fragmentation into thousands of local and average situations. Authenticity is thus only made possible because everyday fluid action has been disrupted; it signals the end of mute subservience to das Man.

I will now consider the insights we can draw from Heidegger for our present moment; in particular, whether and how we might hope to liberate ourselves from das Man and live authentically today. Heidegger did maintain that the body of social norms can evolve and averageness shift over time. In exceptional circumstances, public normativity can be purposively repositioned, as signs and pronouncements make the system of norms governing our behaviour obtrude itself, so as to effect artificial adjustments. The recent public health advice given in briefings and relayed through signs and noticeboards everywhere in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect case of public normativity being jolted out of its quiet background effects and thrust to the fore. Government guidance has overtly revised the unspoken norms regulating bodily distance, interactions and general comportment. It brought these to our notice; as they resettle to a new average, they will recede again into inconspicuousness. New public health rules have also changed the way equipment such as face masks show up to us in an ordinary environment: rather than the foreboding marks of a disaster site seen in the news or an apocalyptic dystopia imagined in film, they are now an artefact of ordinary life coped with immediately and intuitively.

Some wider social changes stand out as particularly impactful for Heidegger’s philosophy. Social norms appear to be less binding—or at least more inclusive. Yet this does not mean that public normativity has weakened. It still penetrates to the core of our everyday way of comporting ourselves, but it operates covertly, invisibly. “The more openly das Man behaves, the harder it is to grasp, and the slier it is, but the less is it nothing at all.” This, if anything, makes das Man more potent rather than less. No more radical disruption of the self is imaginable than that which occurs on the internet. The self disintegrates into millions of encoded fragments—posts, tweets, comments, blogs, videos, stories, and other online activity—dispersed amongst disconnected and disparate sites, moulded by algorithms and interfaces: anonymous, formless, and certainly not conducive to shaping a cohesive self.

Anonymity and alienation, however, preceded the Internet. They have been felt acutely throughout the 20th century. Mass-production greatly enhanced the standardisation and collective levelling down of wants and aspirations. Globalisation caused traditional societal structures and meanings to recede, and initiated the opening up of all corners of the globe to a single publicly defined ‘international’ average pattern of comportment. Equipmental nexuses stretch across the globe. A piece of equipment and the for-the-sake-of-which towards which it is destined, or perhaps some earlier equipment (involved in a different use) which refers to it, could be on opposite sides of the planet. Suddenly the equipment we manipulate seems foreign and unusual; the familiar texture of the meaningful practical world we inhabit is disrupted. The objects in my kitchen could have been manufactured in China or grown in Brazil; thus, they hardly gel together, as a cohesive whole, into a world already made intelligible according to the norms of my culture and the possibilities I project into. The world of my everyday concern seems to run away from me. Authenticity has never felt more distant.

Das Man towered too high; the inauthenticity of their mass-produced public mode of being was too apparent. As a result, the ideal of authenticity has been fetishized in our modern times and pursued in almost all quarters of life. Think of the recent revival of vinyl, polaroid, and similar analogue technologies; or the energy behind farmshops, ‘going local’ and organic in what we eat; and the popularity of gap years, guided travel tours and the USP of an ‘authentic’ experience. Yet even the ideal of authenticity has been appropriated by das Man, inserted into the circuit of public normativity.

The hipster is a for-the-sake-of-which provided by society, in terms of which one can understand oneself. An ‘authentic’ Italian restaurant can be found in any city—where the recipe for authenticity seems to be ‘typical’ red-and-white checked tablecloths, “mama’s lasagne”, and waiters with vaguely Italian accents. Moreover, a quick search through the business section of the Amazon bookstore shows a recent proliferation of management and economy books aiming to convey to their readers the potency of authenticity as a sales weapon. Consider the following telling titles: Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (2007); Building Brand Authenticity (2009); Authenticity: The Head, Heart and Soul of Selling. Discover a New World of Sales Power (2014); The Art of Authenticity: Tools to Become an Authentic Leader and Your Best Self (2016).45 The pretensions to authenticity espoused by these books are manufactured and cosmetic—but many people seem oblivious to the irony and perversity of it. Where the ideal of authenticity lies within the folds of the public social body, it is endogenous to das Man; thus, it becomes just another juncture of regulation and reproduction, a commodity to be traded and an outlet for exercising normativity—and not a point of exit.

Such manufactured authenticity now surrounds us. We are encircled by a dense thicket of advertisements—plastered on billboards and TV, strewn across magazines, websites and social media platforms—offering us a refracted image of what our lives might be. The currency through which public normativity is received and reproduced today is a complex of signs, slogans and images, projecting a certain “authentic” way of life—whereas it used to primarily be interpersonal interactions. That is not to say das Man does not express itself still through a disapproving glance or an understanding nod as well; only that das Man primarily expresses itself today through these multiform images of authenticity that constantly assail us.

This is buttressed by a literature of ‘expert’ advice, opinions and insights relayed in TV chat shows, tweets, and self-help books. Das Man has democratised—insofar as it no longer emanates chiefly from esteemed community leaders and traditions, but from an open interchange of voices, especially celebrities and influencers—alongside the shadowy influence of managers and marketers. The notion of appealing to ‘target audiences’ (of being shaped by, and reciprocally gently plying, a particular way of life in the things a company produces) and ‘selling a lifestyle’ through advertisements are both blatant examples of the way the normative threads of for-the-sakes-of-whichs pull and bind us: the most transparent mark of the determination of our lives by das Man. The character Mark Renton from Trainspotting nicely (yet scathingly) captures the spirit of das Man today:

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage.46

These signs, slogans and images are fractured shards offering pockets of perfect lives we can buy and sell, promising self-anointed ‘authenticity’. Out of them, we are told, we can compile piecemeal a cohesive and whole existence. They broadcast the average towards which we gather—itself defined by the total ensemble of advertised or advocated lifestyles. We are no longer instructed (explicitly or otherwise) in how one ought to comport oneself, but are shown it—shown the lives we ought to live, at the same time as we are directed towards the (false) concrete means of attaining it. This shapes our perceptions of the world, but the world perceived is one already clogged with such images and such pre-packaged dreams. Hence a rift opens between the reality offered to us and the reality that confronts us. The pictures of a complete and stationary life offered by advertising cannot be attained: even after I have bought that house or go on that holiday, I will still be told to “Buy More!”, “Look Better!”; I will still desire other, better things, behind which the secret of a genuine and full existence withdraws. I am still locked into the economy of trading and accumulating things so as to obtain that existence. When we chase authenticity as a commodity, we cannot live it.

To be authentic in this modern world, then, is to glide freely across this inundation of proffered lifestyles, not enthralled by any, but selecting from them the elements that feed into the material of a pre-established vision of what one's life should be. This is established in consultation with the factical aspects of one’s life—one’s thrownness—and in the anticipation of death. My self-understanding is not built by piecing together assorted for-the-sake-of-whichs thrust upon me; rather, my self- understanding dictates which for-the-sake-of-whichs I assimilate into my life.

Given these recent trends, an authentic existence might appear to be more elusive today than in Heidegger’s time. However, other social changes have occurred which, to my mind, necessitate that public normativity has thinned and become more open. One such change is multiculturalism: the confluence and cohabitation of distinct cultural heritages and practices in a single society. Using the framework of Heidegger’s concepts, multiculturalism is defined as the event of separate bodies of social norms, and bodies of social practices, merging into a single unified meaningful world of background practices—where equipment solicits certain actions according to one’s ‘cultural perspective’ within that world. I would interact with a mosque I visit differently to a practising Muslim. Multiculturalism can be contrasted to the phenomenon of cultural appropriation, which rips individual items of equipment from their embedded position in their equipmental nexus and their totality of uses, and reassigns it to a foreign body of social practices. It therefore obliterates received ways of coping with equipment that resultantly no longer shows up as a meaningful part of an environment where things matter in the established way. While cultural appropriation is the purposive activity of individuals, multiculturalism is, in contrast, an organic social process that opens up a plurality of interpretations of a mutually intelligible world.

The relevant upshot of these trends is that no single body of norms, governing the appropriate social practices to which equipment can be assigned, is hegemonic. Public normativity is no solid monolith; it occupies a site of contested cultural practices. It was once true that one eats with cutlery in the West and chopsticks in the East; but now I use chopsticks in my local Wagamama’s—and could do for every meal if I so chose. As a result, social practices interlock less securely with each other and with items of equipment; assignments and references are less rigid and binding. As public normativity is less firm and solid, there is some slack in how norms govern what practices equipment is appropriate for and how one should comport oneself. Thus, the field of solicitations is less determinate, and das Man exercises less control over how one’s world shows up. The world of das Man has fractured into little universes that invite different ways of skilful everyday coping and comportment. Everyday life, then, has become inherently disrupted. The social world is no longer a homogenous tapestry but a patchwork quilt. Faced with contested standards of averageness and patterns of public comportment, the individual can hardly conceal that their own selves are the sole locus of moral justification, and hence the carrier of all responsibility for their actions. The already disrupted character of everyday life opens the possibility of attaining authenticity more than the active disruption committed by Dasein.

However, the widespread achievement of authenticity is disbarred by the concomitant ascendance of the rationalistic scientific model of the universe—beneath whose gaze human beings are reduced to the strictly determined effect of a confluence of outside factors. This picture of the self as causally determined eclipses a prior notion of self, that espoused by Heidegger and the existentialists—as a free agent, an opening onto the world, a centre of creative and interpretive activity around which the meaningful world unfurls itself. This development is very much inimical to understanding the self as a whole and ineliminable unit enduring across time that is the ultimate ground of its actions—the self- understanding that constitutes authentic living.

The world is the entire constellation of equipment, practices and for-the-sake-of-whichs, organised according to human purposes and already meaningful for Dasein because of those purposes. Dasein’s comportment discloses the world in which it lives, and it is in terms of this world that Dasein understands both itself and the items of equipment around it. According to Heidegger’s account of basic everyday human life we are in a state of sedate sublimity, embedded in our surroundings in a sort of dynamic communion of fluid action and solicitations, each reaching out towards and pressing off one another. It is a picture of a perfectly calibrated and integrated holistic phenomenon—being- in-the-world. Yet there are cracks in this harmonious whole. Dasein’s concerned absorption in the world—its skilful, transparent coping with the practical situation—is disrupted by adopting the detached, theoretical attitude. Moreover, the preponderance of das Man over all aspects of ordinary life disrupts the self. Heidegger believed that by disrupting everyday concernful absorption through anxiety, we can escape das Man, and attain authenticity in our lives.

In recent times the world of everyday concern has become more open and contested, which nurtures the achievement of authenticity. If we are to live authentically, however, we must also recover a sense of ourselves as unique beings, the centres and sources of our world—and not merely a corollary of the world. We must be open to the fact of our being-in-the-world, the interior, open, interpretive activity of our existing that is counterposed to the kind of being belonging to the limp entities we encounter and ordinarily manipulate in our everyday lives. If we do not, therefore, allow our scientific age to disable perceiving ourselves as ineliminable, consistent wholes, then our ability to manoeuvre more freely through a contested and open social world means authenticity will be more within reach now than ever before.

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