‘As One Does’: Understanding Heidegger’s Account of das Man

Tucker McKinney

forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy

Submitted Version. Please request permission before citing.

Abstract: Heidegger describes Dasein as subject to a constant pressure to bring its intentional
performances into agreement with those of its peers and thence with a generic description of ‘what
one [das Man] does’, called Dasein's conformism. I argue that extant accounts of this pressure, which
appeal to the essential social embeddedness of intentional performance, fail to account for both the
scope and modal force of the demand to act as one does. I propose that we can better understand the
role of das Man in Heidegger's account of intentional agency by exploiting a structural similarity
between 'Dasein' and the familiar notion of epistemic capacity, or a power of knowledge. The result
is an account that locates the source of das Man's authority not in our social nature, but in our shared
aspiration to ontological understanding.

1 The Problem of Das Man

Despite its slight presence in Heidegger’s corpus as a whole, Heidegger’s account of das Man is

enormously important in the study of Dasein presented in Being and Time. There, the account forms

the backbone of a disjunctive account of the norm-governed character of intentional performance. In

section §27 of Being and Time, Heidegger casts everyday Dasein in the role of estranged political subject,

oppressed at the hands of the ‘dictatorship’ of an anonymous, average conspecific, das Man. Driven

by an urge to mitigate the difference between its own behavior and that of its peers—a concern

Heidegger calls ‘distantiality’ or ‘conformism’ [Abständigkeit]—Dasein assumes a ‘subjection’ to das Man,

modulating its behavior so as to ‘take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as one takes pleasure; [to] read,

view, and judge literature and art as one views and judges; likewise [to] shrink back from the ‘great

crowd’ as one shrinks back; [to] find shocking what one finds shocking’, and so on (SZ 126-7).i The

tyranny of this average, nameless ‘one’ proves so pervasive and so controlling of everyday Dasein’s

ways of being that, in the everyday mode, ‘I’ am not ‘myself’ at all, but a degraded shell: an anyone-self

[Man-selbst]. The anyone-self of everyday Dasein is contrasted with the authentic self, who acts from

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an understanding of its ‘ownmost’ ability-to-be. Authentic Dasein achieves self-ownership. But it does

so only by retroactively cancelling das Man’s authority, by ‘bringing itself back’ from lostness in das Man,ii

and forming a resolution in confrontation with that possibility—death—that singles it out as a distinct

individual.

Readers of Being and Time sometimes betray a tendency to treat the complex nest of claims

rehearsed above as a report of phenomenological fact-finding, beyond the reach of philosophical

reconstruction. On this way of receiving it, Heidegger’s doctrine of das Man simply forms part of an

attempt to characterize ‘what it’s like’ to be in-the-world, and we must simply take for granted that it

is part of what it is to be the thing Heidegger calls ‘Dasein’ to be subject to the conformist social

pressures that the account describes, and not ask why or how this pressure toward conformity arises.

This stance towards the text, besides severely limiting the prospects for productive philosophical

engagement with the work, becomes difficult to maintain in the face of the work’s expansive ambition.

For ‘Dasein’ is evidently a name which applies to any entity that understands being, i.e., any entity that

could be party to the ‘we’ that is invoked in the work’s opening sentence.iii Seen in this light, the

doctrine of das Man advances the extraordinary claim that the normative warrants which guide the

intentional behavior of any entity capable of understanding must take one of two forms. Either these

acts are legitimated by the dictatorial pronouncement of das Man, or else they transpire through the

certainty of authentic self-understanding. Since this is evidently a fact about understanding agency as

such—whether human or not—it cannot be satisfactorily explained by appeal to evolutionary pressures

or psychological tendencies. To understand Heidegger’s doctrine of das Man, then, evidently requires

us to see why the normative warrants guiding intentional behavior are appropriately carved up in this

disjunctive fashion. But we cannot answer that question without a satisfactory account of the place of

that anonymous ‘one’ in the execution of intentional performance considered just as such.

Despite the attention that Heidegger’s account of das Man has attracted in recent years, I will

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argue that this interpretive demand has not been met. The cause of the shortcoming lies in a failure

to take seriously the thought that das Man operates by levying a normative demand upon Dasein. On

Heidegger’s account, das Man prescribes activity to everyday Dasein, and everyday Dasein slavishly

obeys this prescription, not out of material necessity, but because what das Man says, goes. Taking this

thought seriously requires explaining why those activities predicated of das Man prescribe like action

to everyday Dasein. In lieu of seeking the source of this prescription’s authority, commentators have

tended to latch on to the suggestion that conformism tempts Dasein by offering to relieve it of the

burdens of owning up to its unsettled nature. But if das Man is only that devil that seduces us into

‘self-incurred minority’,iv then we must ask why this temptation is constitutive of agency, and why it

does not suffice to nullify it to become apprised of the benefits of self-responsibility. The influence

of das Man is subtler and more pervasive than this influential picture can hope to capture. We cannot

secure the source of das Man’s claim on us except by identifying some general motive—however

ultimately deleterious—for seeking to mitigate the difference between one’s performances and one’s

peers, to do just ‘as one does’.

The most powerful attempts to supply this basisv have generally attempted to locate it in a

claim about the necessity of a social-normative regime for the very possibility of self-consciousness

and intentional performance. Yet, I shall argue that while a general normative regime is indeed

plausibly necessary for these capacities, there seems to be scant grounds for taking the normative

regime to be social in the way that the normative demand of conformism appears to be. To

accommodate this desideratum, I shall connect the doctrine of das Man to the programmatic aims of

Being and Time, which link Dasein’s being to the possibility of inquiry. Drawing on Heidegger’s

discussion of das Man in the Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time, I argue that the pressure to

seek convergence in our intentional performance lies in the fact that intentional performances,

whether our own or those of others, all possess an object—the being of entities—in common. The

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source of das Man’s apparent authority thus arises not from any social impulse, but from a more basic

pretense to ontological knowledge, which urges us to relate to the objects in our midst just as anyone

who genuinely grasps their being would.

This interpretive proposal removes a source of cleavage between Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein

and the broader aims of his philosophy. Where the doctrine of das Man is thought to secure the

stranglehold of social norms over everyday Dasein’s behavior, commentators have been forced to

attribute to Heidegger elaborate explanations for how standards of truth and objectivity—surely

central to the inquiry into the sense of being—could become salient for Dasein. vi If, as I shall

recommend, the authority of das Man derives from an aspiration to objectivity, then this effort can be

saved, and a much simpler and more elegant story told of how Dasein’s pervasive interest in

understanding being becomes diverted into its fallen, everyday form. The price of this story, however,

is a new re-evaluation of the semantic value of Heidegger’s term ‘Dasein’. For the way to appreciate

how das Man can be both constitutive of Dasein and yet an impediment to its actualization is to identify

‘Dasein’ with that singular capacity for ontological knowledge to which we all aspire.

2 A Necessary Dictatorship?

On a natural and common reading of the opening of Being and Time, when Heidegger announces that

‘we are ourselves the entities to be analyzed’ (SZ 42), and subsequently attaches the title ‘Dasein’ to

the objects of his study, he implies that the term ‘Dasein’ shares its extension with the noun-phrase

‘individual human being’.vii For as straightforward and obvious as this gloss appears to be, however,

it raises a prima facie difficulty in accounting for the place of das Man. For if ‘Dasein’ is just the name

for an individual human being who possesses an understanding of being, what ground can there be

for claiming that the entity named will be pervasively conformist in its attitudes towards the world—

that its take on its environment will tend toward convergence with others’? Olafson articulates the

problem as follows

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 Although it is understood that it is an essential feature of Dasein that the entities it uncovers

are, at least in principle, the same entities in the same world that like entities uncover, and

although Heidegger has indicated that the relationships among these uncoverings are not

merely additive in character, there is no real account of the way in which my uncovering an

entity as an entity depends upon someone else’s doing so as well. As a result, the uncovering

of entities as entities by one Dasein comes to seem quite distinct from their uncovering by

others, even though it is stipulated that each such Dasein understands that its uncovering is

not unique and that the entities uncovered are the same from one case to another. At no

point is there any definite indication of why uncovering must be joint and convergent, if

that is indeed what Heidegger holds to be the case; it is therefore hard to see why the

uncoveredness or presence in which entities show themselves as entities and as the same

entities that others uncover must be single and common. (Olafson 1994: 146)

An analysis that is trained on individual human beings and their capacities will have to show how and

why particular human beings are prone to share a ‘world’ in common, why they are disposed to seek

agreement in their interpretive stances towards the world. The doctrine of das Man might seem (in

principle) to promise an answer to this question, in its stipulation that we maintain a concern to

mitigate the difference in our behavior relative to those around us, called ‘Abständigkeit’, ‘conformism’.

But as Olafson (1994: 56-7) notes, what we need is not a stipulated interest but an explanation of the

source of that interest and the possibility of its satisfaction.

To fill this gap, readers including Carman and Blattner have attempted to locate an implicit

transcendental argument in Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. This argument seeks

to show that the familiar, conscious experience of our own personhood and agency in fact depends

upon a prior identification with a publicly shared regime of normativity. This is because experiencing

one’s own agency involves experiencing features of the world as mattering in various ways, which (the

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story goes) is only possible in relation to the practical projects we pursue. But engaging in practical

projects means, in the first instance, interpreting entities within the environment as invested with

practical significance. The practical significance of tools, resources, ends, and the like is governed by

standards of propriety, which dictate how those tools and resources are to be used, for what ends and

when, and so on.viii These standards of propriety are not, however, inert ‘properties’ but assignments:

roughly, they are ways in which items of paraphernalia are apportioned roles within the practices of a

community in order to form a ‘referential nexus of significance’. Hence, when Heidegger indicates

that ‘das Man articulates [the] referential nexus of significance’ (SZ 129) he provides us with an

explanation of the authority of das Man. For to grasp, e.g., a hammer as a hammer is just to understand

what one does with it, how it is properly used. This standard of proper use, however, is a social norm: it

is a norm whose force is impressed upon us by the threat of censure and ostracization. Thus, we derive

the result that our awareness of ourselves in our own agency would not be possible if not for our

subjection to a socially-prescribed regime of practical understanding (Blattner 1999: 63).

The transcendental argument thus described takes its cue from two observations, which it

attempts to link to a much more robust and, I will argue, ultimately questionable claim. The first

observation is that our ability to locate ourselves in practical space depends upon our subjection to a

set of norms which are properly general in their scope: they apply to agents without regard for their

differentiated identities within a given context. As Dreyfus explains:

Norms and the averageness they sustain perform a crucial function. Without them the

referential whole [of practical significance] could not exist. In the West one eats with a knife

and fork; in the Far East one eats with chopsticks. The important thing is that in each culture

there are equipmental norms and thus an average way to do things. There must be, for

without such averageness there could be no equipmental whole… If some ate with forks,

and others with chopsticks, and still others used their right hands, the way food was cut up,

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 and whether one got a washcloth with dinner, whether there was bread or rice, plates or

bowls, etc. would be undecided, and the whole equipmental nexus involved in cooking and

eating a meal could not exist. For eating equipment to work, how one eats, when one eats,

where one eats, what one eats, and what one eats with must already be determined. (Dreyfus

1991: 153-4)

As Dreyfus illustrates, the understanding we possess of general norms of use is promulgated to us

through a process of enculturation, wherein we learn by mimicking the behavior of others, and in so

doing, acquire a general grasp of ‘what one does’. On its own, however, this is not enough to supply

an explanation of the attitude of conformism: for, plausibly, having become apprised of a regular way

of moving ourselves about in the world, we could dispense with our interest in seeing to it that our

behavior converges to shared precedent. This worry is, however, met by a second observation: that

the protocols we acquire are socially variable, specific to the culture we inhabit. Hence, we learn to

navigate the world by learning ‘what one does’ insofar as they are one of us.

Granting the sensibility of these observations, we must inquire as to their probative force with

respect to the link between social normativity and the sense of self. To appearances, the observations

provide material for an abductive inference. For the argument moves from the idea that our ability to

navigate the world is mediated by a cultural agent-general understanding to the idea that this ability is

governed by social norms: that is, by norms whose authority is backed by the threat of ostracization or

censure. Such a regime of social normativity is held to be the best, or perhaps the only, satisfactory

explanation for the proprieties of use which constitute practical paraphernalia. If that supposition proved

correct, then we could infer from the fact that we are bound by proprieties of use to the conclusion

that we must be pervasively concerned with maintaining standards of normality which regulate group-

membership.

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 On reflection, however, it is hard to see why a regime of group-membership norms should provide

the best explanation for the body of practical knowledge that we possess. That the hammer is properly

used for driving nails is not, in the first instance, a function of what we say about it, but facts about

what needs prevail in a given context, what resources there are to serve them, what kinds of

practitioners are present with what bodily competencies (and so on) independently suffice to

determine what, hic et nunc, is properly used for what. Norms of etiquette may serve to guide us toward

such proprieties in certain cases, but they hardly constitute them. Consider likewise that it makes sense

to speak of proprieties of use even in non-standard contexts. For example, if I should find it necessary

to drive a nail into a wall, but the only thing I have at my disposal is a screwdriver, it is natural to say

that in wielding the screwdriver handle as a makeshift hammer, I am doing as one does. Social proprieties

governing the use of specific items of equipment are ill-suited to guide us in these cases, unprecedented

as they often are. And yet the fact that we can readily and immediately find something to do in

confronting the absence of a hammer, for which the expression ‘what one does’ is fitting, suggests

that such a breakdown scenario does not represent any cessation of das Man’s ‘dictatorship’ or of

Dasein’s ‘conformism’. Wielding the screwdriver as a makeshift hammer strikes us what we should do

because it is ‘what one does’ in that it is what makes sense to do. As Heidegger suggests, our concern with

the work of fastening permits us to discover the screwdriver in terms of a calculative order of

instrumentality and productivity that belongs to the situation itself, to which anyone placed the in same

circumstance would have access. If that thought is right, it suggests that we ought to associate das Man

not with socially regulated protocols but, instead, with claims to knowledge.

Readers sympathetic to the social-normative account of das Man may insist that the suggestion

illicitly severs the interpretation of the doctrine of das Man from the broader anti-Cartesian ambition

of Being and Time. On their view, attempting to construe Dasein’s relation to das Man in normative

terms represents a regression to the very model of agency that Heidegger wishes for us to overcome.

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As Rouse (2014) argues, it would ascribe to Heidegger a ‘weak’ conception of human sociality,

according to which our social bonds are built up out of the attitudes of individuals, whereas Heidegger

aims to endorse a ‘strong’ conception, on which our status as individuals is grounded in the fact that

we occupy a place within a social-normative regime. Carman (1994) argues that our impulse to

conform to social norms precedes our sense of self, as our felt sense of the distance between our

behavior and our peers’ supplies the impetus for first interpretation of ourselves as distinct individuals

within social space. And Christensen (2012: 271) echoes the same thought, suggesting that, for

Heidegger, 'only as being with others in this sense, as belonging to a group defined by such a shared

sense of the average or typical, am I initially aware of myself’. These readers insist, in answer to

Olafson’s question, that the disposition towards conformity arises because our agency is constituted by

its subjection to social norms. Yet these responses miss the more basic point of Olafson’s critique.

For, on their reading, Heidegger insists that agency is constituted by the prevailing of some set of

agent-general-norms over an individual. But this insistence is redeemed even if the normative regime

governing each agent’s behavior is perfectly independent of the next. And in that case, the supposed

primacy of social norms affords no explanation of Dasein’s conformism, that pervasive interest in

mitigating the difference between itself and others that is supposed to account for das Man’s

dictatorship. For we could admit that Dasein is necessarily governed by general norms while denying

it any motivation to pay attention to agents other than itself.

The question remains: if Heidegger takes himself to be offering an account of the constitution of

individuals (as Daseins), what room can he have to insist on the essential sharedness of social norms, but

as byproducts of the ‘identities’ that we each separately—but somehow convergently?—‘project’ for

ourselves? We cannot avoid Olafson’s puzzle so long as we persist in the thought that it is we as

individuals who are the entities to be analyzed. No wonder, then, that in the service of redeeming

Heidegger’s anti-Cartesian aspirations, the doctrine of das Man has led some to reject that very

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assumption.

3 Conformity and Shared Practice

In his review of Olafson’s Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind, John Haugeland notes that while Olafson

astutely identifies the tension between, on the one hand, the public and unitary character of being and

world, and on the other, the plurality of Daseins if ‘there are as many Daseins as there are people’, he

does not

explore […] seriously the possibility that Heidegger did not intend Dasein to have the plurality

of persons, but rather meant it as singular and common. Such commonality need not (indeed

could not) be that of a genus (personhood, Homo sapiens), but would instead have to be that

of a distinctive particular in which we all somehow ‘participate’. (Haugeland 1990: 634-5)

Haugeland proposes that ‘Dasein’ be understood as the name for such a super-personal phenomenon:

that is, an entity whose individuation conditions dictate that the relation of Dasein to ‘people’ is one-

to-many, even as every person may be said to ‘have’ Dasein. Haugeland elaborates this suggestion by

identifying Dasein as an activity in which individuals participate, what he calls a ‘living way of life’.

In addition to readily accommodating Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is not a substance,

Haugeland’s proposal also affords a promising approach to the difficulties associated with das Man. In

the first place, the proposal provides an answer for why das Man belongs to Dasein’s ‘being’ in the

first place. For if ‘Dasein’ denotes a single activity in which many individuals may be said to participate,

Dasein will be constituted precisely by the convergence among these individuals upon a common

standard of success. If we begin by identifying Dasein as a shared activity, we do not have to ask how

individuals come to consensus about ‘what one does’—for there is Dasein only insofar as some such

consensus prevails (Haugeland 2013: 130-1).

Second, the account allows us to make a certain amount of sense of how this consensus governs

the behavior of individuals. On Haugeland’s reading, to speak of individuals is to speak of ‘cases’ of

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Dasein (cf. ‘cases’ of the flu), and of persons generally as those entities who share in Dasein: Others, in

Heidegger’s lexicon. To understand the binding force of conformist pressure on individuals is thus to

understand the relationship between Dasein and its cases. Regarding this relationship, it seems clear

enough that conformism is necessary for any activity of living a certain way of life to persist. The

relevant question is then why particular cases of Dasein should seek this persistence. Here, a reader

sympathetic to Haugeland may appeal to Heidegger’s claim that Dasein relates to its being as a

‘burden’, as something that it has ‘to be’ (SZ 42). If we gloss this in application to cases of Dasein, that

might encourage us to say the following: each person is the person that she is in virtue of living her

way of life, e.g. in virtue of being a botanist, and/or an American, a numismatist, etc. But this way of

life is something that each agent must constantly seek to sustain, in the sense of really endeavoring to

live up to whatever standards of successful activity that it comprehends. And that means that she must

seek to conform to the general standard that constitutes that way of life as the way of life that it is,

which will require her to pay attention to, and seek to mitigate, the variances between her own

comportment and that of her conspecifics, just as the doctrine of das Man implies.

Yet at this precise juncture, there is reason to worry that unless we say something more robust

about the nature of the individual ‘cases’ of Dasein, we will be unable to account for the binding force

of any particular set of activity-norms. For the explanation supposes that our conformist impulse

directs our attention to those who we take to share in our way of life: those from whom ‘we do not

distinguish ourselves’. But this way of understanding the mechanism of das Man’s dictatorship seems

to concede the possibility that, confronted with any discrepancy between our way of comporting

ourselves and that which other agents exhibit, we might distinguish our way of life from theirs and in

doing so cancel the pressure to conform to anything. Heidegger regards it as constitutive of Dasein

that cases of this phenomenon exhibit a concern for how their behavior differs from Others—i.e.

those whose Dasein they share. Yet if Dasein is differentiated as a ‘living way of life’, then it looks as

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though such difference-cum-similarity may be readily defeasible. For the criteria of sharing a Dasein in

common consists in participating in the same practices, doing the same things; but the condition of the

feeling of conformism requires a difference between the ways that I comport myself and the ways that

others do. Why then, cannot every case of failed conformity be written off as a case in which we ought

to distinguish our Dasein (or my Dasein) from theirs? Why, again, must a living way of life be essentially

shared?

Of course it must be consistent with being a practitioner of a given way of life that my conformity

with others is imperfect: practices must allow for a certain degree of variability from one performance

to the next, as well as room for agents to make mistakes. Moreover, few ways of life can, in fact, be

sustained by isolated individuals, for many of the things we do would not be possible in the absence

of cooperation and social recognition. Ceasing to recognize another as a co-practitioner, whenever

their activity deviates from the standards I take to constitute my way of life, incurs a significant cost,

to be sure. Prudence will counsel that we recognize the other as an Other in Heidegger’s sense, as

someone who shares our Dasein and so can work with us toward common purposes. But such

prudential concern does not supply the right sort of basis for insisting that, as a matter of fact, two

persons share the same Dasein when their actual performances diverge from one another. At most, it

seems we would have a basis for acting as if the other’s Dasein were the same as one’s own, readily

defeated whenever the pragmatic cost of conformity proves to be too great. The task of developing

Haugeland’s proposal would then seem to require that we find a basis for drawing a distinction

between taxonomic contexts, in which we are concerned with determining what ways of life exist, and

evaluative ones, in which we may take a set of prevailing norms for granted and ask whether agents

live up to them. For unless we know when the work of taxonomizing forms of life is complete, the

individual ‘case’ of Dasein cannot in principle be licensed to the assumption that another case in fact

shares the same Dasein as herself.

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 But it is hard to see how we could amend Haugeland’s proposal by providing criteria for

individuating forms of life without running the serious risk of gerrymandering a concept to suit our

purposes. Surely the question of what distinguishes one form of life from the next is, by its nature,

incorrigibly imprecise. But the doctrine of das Man trades on a presumption of sameness: on Haugeland’s

reading, the point is that two cases of Dasein feel the conformist pressure that they do because they take

themselves to be numerically identical with respect to their Dasein. It is to the credit of Haugeland’s reading of

the text that he recognizes the need to secure the soundness of this presumption, to specify on what basis

an agent could legitimately see herself as one-among-many by identifying a respect in which the agent is

one-among-many. For Haugeland’s Heidegger, conformity provides that mechanism by which the

integrity of Dasein, understood as a life-form, is maintained over time. Our problem arises when we

note that, from the agent’s point of view, there seems to be no evident reason why any particular

standard of such integrity ought to be preserved over any other.

We could amend Haugeland’s proposal to good effect if we could identify that basis on which

agents recognize the common purport of their activities. For sameness of purport would supply, in

the spirit of Haugeland’s proposal, a way in which my sense-making activities and yours could be bound

up with one another, not just as two instances of some common activity-type, but as performances

which are to-be-governed by the same law. In that case, what anyone does in respect of a given circumstance

would provide a prima facie reason for me to act in kind: for in virtue of our shared aspiration, the act

would show not just what one-of-such-and-such-a-kind does in those circumstances, but how I should

act as well insofar as I am trying to do the same thing. But to avail ourselves of this thought, we require

some ground for thinking that no matter how we happen to actually behave, our own Dasein and the

Dasein of those other agents that we encounter in our milieu are rightly understood to share an aim

in common. It will be my task in the remainder of this paper to suggest an assessment of the logical-

grammar of ‘Dasein’ that readily accommodates this desideratum.

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4 Conformity, Objectivity, and Epistemic Capacity
I began by observing that das Man serves as a source of rational prescription pervasively acknowledged

by everyday Dasein. Though Dasein has no choice in the matter, it identifies the anonymous ‘Other’

of das Man as a kind of sovereign, a ‘someone’ whose words and actions determine how it should

behave. Our struggle has been to understand why everyday Dasein submits to das Man’s authority,

which proves equivalent to the question: why does everyday Dasein so unyieldingly concern itself with

maintaining its ‘average’ indistinguishability from the crowd? Above, I suggested that we might take a

cue from Haugeland’s controversial re-interpretation of the semantics of Dasein, according to which

the tyranny of das Man over everyday Dasein arises from a feature of the grammar of Heidegger’s

term-of-art. If ‘Dasein’ names not a thing but an activity, then doing as one does becomes compulsory for

any participant in that activity, in that ‘Dasein.’ As we have seen, this proposal takes us some distance

toward an account of the ontological significance of das Man, but leaves us wanting for an answer as

to why separate participants in a common activity must regard one another as attempting to do the

same thing. In other words, it fails to locate the source of the presumption of sameness in activity that co-

participants must share if it is to make sense for them to seek to mitigate their differences.

In his discussion of das Man in the summer semester of 1925, Heidegger gives a slightly more

elaborate account of the source of Dasein’s conformism that points towards a solution of this

difficulty. There Heidegger writes:

It was already suggested that, in that which comes first and most of all to everyday concern

the particular Dasein is always what it pursues. One is what one does. The everyday

interpretation of Dasein takes its horizon of interpretation and denomination from what

is of concern in each case. One is a shoemaker, tailor, teacher, banker. Here Dasein is

something which others also can be and are. Not only because what is of concern has the

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 character of usefulness and helpfulness for others are others environmentally there with

us, and their codasein taken into account, but also insofar as others attend to the same

things. In both regards, being-with others stands in a relationship to them: i.e. with

consideration for others and for what they attend to, one’s own concern is considered more

or less successful or useful in relation to those who attend to the same, more or less

outstanding, backward, appreciated, or the like. In the concern for what one manages with,

for, and against them, others are not simply present-at-hand, but concern as concern

constantly dwells in care for one’s difference from them, even if only to equalize it[.] (GA

20: 336-7, bold emphasis mine)

Of note in this passage is that Heidegger characterizes the source of conformism in the sameness of

the objects to which we, and our conspecifics, relate. The ‘differences’ between our concernful activity

and our peers’, moreover, are not evaluatively neutral: they are differences of relative success and

failure in meeting common targets in relation to those objects, in, e.g., making the shoe, teaching

one’s pupils, taking deposits, etc., as one who claims expertise with respect to the relevant phenomena

does.

This passage suggests that we are pressed to converge to a common standard because our

activities manifest a claim to knowing how to work the leather, conduct the class, and so on. If we resist,

for a moment, the temptation to focus on the fact that the aims of the work are socially interpreted

products, and focus instead on the fact that the production of those products manifests this claim to

knowledge, we may find an explanation of the source of conformist pressures readily forthcoming.

To see how, consider a simple theoretical pursuit. Let A and B be two journalists independently

seeking an answer to a question of mutual interest. In such a context, A and B will each have good

reason to concern themselves with what the other says: for though convergence upon an answer is no

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guarantee of truth, any inconsistency between them will pose a threat to the credibility of either. In

factual inquiry, agents do well to get their stories straight: to ensure that whatever they judge will be

affirmed by each of their (actual and possible) co-inquirers, either by affirming the consensus or by

addressing the differences between their own performance and those of others in order to show that

their performance provides the standard. The exercises of such agents will be subject to a normative

pressure toward convergence because they possess a common target, apt to be ‘hit’ by a determinate

sort of act. Each agent’s interest in the performance of the other could be explained by appeal to their

joint recognition of this fact. Given such an interest, it is not hard to imagine how a conformist impulse

might be born, should hitting the target prove to be especially fraught.

That A and B ask the same question in relation to the same circumstance dictates that their

performances can only be successful if they converge upon an answer. This association of convergence

with truth may readily give rise to a tendency toward conformism provided several conditions obtain.

First, both agents must mutually recognize that they share a target in common and that hitting this

target requires some determinate, singular performance: a faithful recording of the relevant facts.

Second, they must not, qua inquirers, already (i.e. prior to acting) be in a position to say what does and

does not constitute hitting the target. Third, (again, qua inquirers) their claim to have hit the target

must be, at any point, capable of being called into question. In that case, A and B endeavor to enact a

performance whose criteria of success are not known to them, but which ideally become manifest to

them as their inquiring activity progresses to completion, and to which they can be held appropriately

responsible regardless at any point along the way. Given the precariousness of such a position, the

interest of each agent in the story told by the other becomes quite reasonable, indeed.

The relevant features of this case are, however, not, in fact, unique to theoretical inquiry. Consider

that, where there is a way to best wield an instrument or work up a material in pursuit of a given task,

there is a knowledge of how to do those things, and so likewise a standard to which claims to knowledge-

16
how in respect of that circumstance should conform. Wherever our methods could (however notionally)

be improved, our claim to know-how can be called into question. In any such instance, it is possible

to discover that we are not, as we thought we were, practicing as one—i.e. as one who knows how—does.

In such cases, we may find ourselves disposed to seek instruction from practices of others who (we

acknowledge) light upon the same tasks in the same circumstances and perform them well. The

normativity which presses all such claims to knowledge—theoretical and practical alike—towards

convergence with one another arises as a consequence of the indifference of knowledge to the identity

of its possessor. In Kantian terms, knowledge possesses a subjective universal validity: what anyone

claims to know ought to be such that any other agent would be right to claim it if they were in the same

position as oneself. ix Knowledge claims purport to dictate what one does in the relevant circumstances

qua knower.

It might seem initially unpropitious to attempt to parlay such observations about knowledge into

an account of the authority of das Man, given Heidegger’s insistence that knowledge is a ‘founded

mode’ of Dasein’s more basic and pervasive condition of being-in-the-world, which das Man helps to

constitute. Yet such a possibility ought to be encouraged by the fact that Heidegger introduces ‘Dasein’

into the text of Being and Time precisely by reference to its capacity as a ‘knower’. ‘To work out the question

of the sense of being adequately’, he writes, ‘we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in

his own being’ (SZ 7). This first reference to ‘Dasein’ designates it as that entity which conducts inquiry into

the sense of being, that entity which attempts to know the nature of that grammatically singular object.

Indeed, this capacity appears to capture Dasein’s essence, as evidenced by Heidegger’s observation

that nascent ‘inquiry’ into being seems to provide the most general genus of the manifestations of

Dasein’s way to be:

Everything we talk about, everything we have in view, everything towards which we

comport ourselves thus and so, is being [Seiend], as is what and who we ourselves are.

17
 Being [Sein] lies in that- and so-being, in reality, presence-at-hand, persistence [Bestand],

validity, Dasein, and in ‘there is…’ (SZ 6-7)x

Our activities exemplify our Dasein precisely to the degree that they manifest and express, as it were,

our answer to questions about being—about what there is, and how—even if we are not normally

disposed to conceive of them as exercises of such an inquiry.xi Thus, when (e.g.) Heidegger describes

our dealings with entities ready-to-hand as aiming to ‘[let] the ready-to-hand be so-and-so as it is

already and in order that it be such’ (SZ 84-5) he implies that we can regard even our everyday

manipulation of practical paraphernalia as embodying claims about what is properly used for what, in

what context, for what short- and long-term ends, and the like. The standard by which such activity is

assessed will then be one which governs all cases of the capacity to understand being, both fork- and

chopstick-users alike, since it articulates what one does qua understander of being at such a time and

place.

If that much is right, then it seems we have an explanation of the source of authority of das Man

over everyday Dasein within reach, provided that we entitle ourselves to the thought that possessing

an understanding of being is relevantly like making a claim to know an object. Yet, readers familiar

with the text may worry that it is far from obvious that this should be so. For Heidegger insists that

‘understanding is not at all primarily a cognition but… a basic determination of existence itself’

(Heidegger 1982: 390), namely, Dasein’s ‘competence over… being as existing’. As this claim is

normally understood, the condition of understanding consists not in some determinate, articulable

grasp of fact but in a general ability we have to live our lives. A capacity so described does not seem

to be the sort that should require uniformity of exercise, but indeed one that would permit as many

different deployments as it possesses instances. In this respect, understanding seems to be quite unlike

epistemic capacity.

18
 The threat of this textual point to the strategy here pursued need not be so great as it initially

appears, however. For we may insist on distinguishing a condition of understanding in general, which

we may rightly be said to exemplify no matter what we do, and which permits as may different forms

as it has instances, from the more rarified condition of understanding being, which need not be so

permissive. As noted, to be Dasein at all evidently means to act in such a way as to advance a claim to

understanding being, to discovering entities in the environment as they are. It thus follows that, insofar

as we are Dasein, each of us makes some claim, however ill-conceived, to possessing understanding in

the rarified sense. And this fact about ourselves will suffice to count us as possessing understanding

in the permissive sense. Our ability to make some such a claim—regardless of its credentials—is our

‘competence at being as existing’. This modest ability for making a claim to genuine understanding is

rightly called a ‘competence’, however, because it too requires a certain more general sort of

knowledge: namely, a knowledge of what kinds of conditions may bear upon the justification (broadly

construed) of the claims I make. We are inquirers with respect to even this latter sort of knowledge,

and may be pressed toward conformism in the light of its elusiveness.

If we accept the connection between Dasein and the capacity to inquire into being, the doctrine

of das Man appears in a new light, since it now serves principally to illustrate the generality of the

subject matter of Being and Time, identifying a specific kind of sameness that two entities may share in

both being ‘Dasein’. If the preceding analysis is sound, we ought not understand that term anymore as

a synonym for ‘individual agent’ nor indeed as a term for an ‘individual form of life’, but rather as the

name for a universal, namely, that singular capacity for ontological knowledge that constitutes our

agency, however we may identify ourselves. As I shall explain presently, such an identification also gives

us the resources necessary to explain the illegitimacy of das Man’s authority over everyday Dasein.

5 The Authority of Das Man

19
The doctrine of das Man stands out as a rare moment in which an apparatus of normativity—of

recognition and submission to standards—figures into Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein. If my

arguments have succeeded however, the extant accounts we have of how this normativity operates—

how, that is, the norms of das Man come to ‘bind’ individual cases of Dasein to average modes of

conduct—seem to render the authority of every one of das Man’s imperatives defeasible and

inessential: on these accounts, no specification of ‘what one does’ would even purport to exact a claim

upon the performances of any individual case of Dasein. Readers may be correct that submitting to a

regime of das Man-ish norms is necessary for having a ‘world’ in the sense that Heidegger describes,

and hence necessary for being some particular Dasein. But even if that is so, the question will arise:

why should the individual agent care to have a ‘world’ in the sense that Heidegger describes?xii And

why should the agent care which Dasein it exemplifies, if many forms of Dasein are possible? If

Heidegger’s aim, in analyzing Dasein, is to characterize the being of an entity whose nature is simply

given to us to examine, he cannot avoid such questions. He can insist that the felt pull of conformism

is constitutive of Dasein only at the risk of alienating that reader who, sincerely inspecting their

motives for such an impulse, finds nothing to answer to it.

Yet there is another way to understand how normativity operates in the analytic of Dasein.

This alternative takes ‘Dasein’ not to denote anything we might count among the objects of receptive

experience, but something which we ‘encounter’ as an object of common aspiration. We are acquainted

with the capacity for ontological knowledge that is Dasein, on this account, just insofar as we find that

possessing such a capacity is at issue for us. Our possession of this capacity comes into question for

us the moment that we notice that, wherever we act, we make a pretense of being able, e.g., to

distinguish what there is from what is not, what something is from what it is not, what must be from

what merely happens to be, and the like. We do this, and yet when we are called upon to articulate

what guides us in making these distinctions, what credentials us to make such a pretense, we falter,

20
giving a hopelessly partial and uncertain account if we are able to say anything at all.xiii If that is at all

correct, then we must recognize ourselves in Heidegger’s description of the ‘vague, average’ and

consequently thoroughly questionable understanding of being that characterizes everyday Dasein. And

in that case, that our activities are what they are in terms of the understanding of being they express

will prove a fact against which we have no recourse.

Considered under this aspect, the activities of thinking and acting must be distinctively anxious

ones, in that these activities do not furnish that criterion by which they are constituted as the activities

that they are. Rather, this constitutive criterion comes from without, from an intelligible connection

of our activities with the world that they attempt to grasp. We pervasively find ourselves, then, in a

position that shares in the precariousness of inquiry, attempting to enact a performance whose criteria

of rightness continually elude our certain grasp. Consequently, we find ourselves subject to a continual

temptation to divert our attentions away from the entities and contexts with which we are confronted,

to give a sidelong glance at our fellow inquirers in search of assurance that we are doing as one—that

is, an understander of being—would do. There can be no question for us of escaping das Man’s ‘dictatorship’

by clever conceptual sleight-of-hand. For having already discovered in our activities a pretense to

claiming a certain good—understanding being—we can readily be induced to feel the normative

pressure identified by the doctrine of das Man just by reminding ourselves of how precarious our claim

to this good is. In the face of such anxiety, the account predicts that we will seek the means at our

disposal to assuage it: we will become conformists out of a desperate effort to mollify our own self-

questioning.xiv

It is important to see, in the spirit of understanding the sense in which das Man furnishes an

existentiale of Dasein, that the sidelong glance of the conformist, per its description, need not be

illegitimate in its intent: to seek to do ‘as an expert does’ surely provides an unimpeachable

characterization of what any aspirant to competence should do. Yet the sidelong glance is given in

21
ignorance, no less afflicted by Dasein’s uncanniness than its first-order engagements with the world.

Everyday Dasein does not know who to light upon as its sage, its exemplar of that capacity which it

aspires to embody. And so it takes its instruction instead from everyone and no-one in particular, from

the ‘public view’ [die Offentlichkeit] (SZ 127). It is this alliance of das Man with the public point of view

that installs das Man as a tyrant, an illegitimate authority. For, mistaking the many for the wise, everyday

Dasein diverts itself from seeking to do as a genuine understander of being would, to seeking to do as

putative understanders of being do.

Crucially, in virtue of embodying such a diversion of its energies, the sidelong glance of the

conformist can provide the paradigmatic failure of self-ownership—because it reflects a temptation to

self-disowning built into the structure of Dasein’s activity at its very root. An activity of inquiry will

be owned when the inquirer is prepared to recognize her activity as an activity of inquiry, and behave

accordingly. To claim such self-ownership, moreover, is no mere accessory to the act, but essential to

its very nature, since one does not inquire, judge, or act at all if one is incapable of recognizing one’s

activities under such a description and of governing them accordingly. In that case, the inquiry would

lose all affinity for its target. To engage in inquiring activities—to intend an entity in understanding—

is to put oneself forward as sensitive in the relevant respects to the requirements of maintaining

openness to the object. Seen in this light, it becomes apparent why the attitude of conformism

represents a recognizable form of self-denial. For though it is unimpeachable to aim to do as an

understander of being would do, we cannot vindicate our claim to being open to the being of entities

by undertaking to act as understanders of being do. For our behavior in that case fails to acknowledge the

possibility that among all (putative) understanders of being, there may be no understander of being,xv

no one, that is, who makes a defensible claim to possessing this capacity. We can claim ownership of

the capacity by which we are called—‘Dasein’—only by acknowledging that our activities embody a

pretense to openness to the world that runs the constant risk of proving hollow.xvi Yet to acquiesce

22
to the imprudence of looking to precedent, and to resolve to fit our performances to the circumstances

as best as we can, while allowing that our claim to worldly openness may be called into question and

indeed voided at any point in time (cf. SZ 307-308), wards against the emptiness of pretense, since

our inquiring activity then in fact acknowledges its own precarious nature (SZ 264-5). Only through

such acquiescence can our gaze be properly directed toward its object, and only then can the promise

of understanding truly be made flesh.

Heidegger’s doctrine thus teaches us that we fool ourselves if, in seeking to claim the mantle

of Dasein, we treat it as proof of our possession of this capacity that we act as any other aspirant to

the capacity does. But to place ourselves instead in subjection to entities, and to acknowledge the

possibility of the impossibility of our every claim to understand them, is to invert our relationship to das

Man, and thence to liberate ourselves from its tyranny. We do not, in such a case, dispense with our

relationship to das Man entirely. For, as Heidegger insists, even authentic Dasein is not ‘detached from

das Man’ (SZ 130). Yet if we can associate das Man in general, in the way I have suggested, with

authoritative claims-to-knowledge, then the non-detachment of authentic Dasein from das Man makes

a certain sense. For in that case, while authentic Dasein does not rest in the received and illegitimate

authority of das Man, it may be said to seek to found this authority anew: to determine, through the

uncanny exercise of its finite understanding, what is required to act as one does. Authentic Dasein thus

takes das Man not as a received authority, but as the horizonal aim of its interpretive activity. To be

sure, this suggestion is speculative: it goes beyond anything Heidegger himself says about authenticity

in order to supply a sense for his enigmatic remark about the persistence of das Man as an ‘essential

existentiale’. But Heidegger’s silence on this point itself proves understandable as soon as we note that

the authentic Man we posit as the horizonal aim of authentic Dasein’s comportment will stand in an

essential and thoroughgoing unity with being in its activities. Aiming to do as one does for authentic

23
Dasein is, in that case, nothing more or less than aiming to embody an understanding of being in

cognizance of what such an aspiration demands.

i All references to Heidegger will be to the German edition pagination of Sein und Zeit (SZ) and the volumes of the

Gesamtausgabe (GA).
ii Cf. SZ 268, 271, 274, 287.
iii SZ 42: ‘We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed. The being of any such entity is in each case mine.’ I take the generic

reference in the second sentence, ‘any such entity,’ to refer to the first-person plural pronoun in the first, so that anyone
who is or could understand themselves as one of ‘us’ count as an instance of the entity under investigation.
iv Cf. Kant (1996: 17).
v E.g. by Dreyfus (1991) and (1995), Carman (1994), Blattner (1999), Christensen (2012), Haugeland (2013), and Rouse

(2014).
vi Haugeland (2000), for example, goes to heroic lengths to show that Dasein, construed as thoroughly governed by social

norms, could nevertheless be brought to the heel of objective norms, given an appropriate understanding of the
existentialist themes of death and conscience.
vii This gloss is extraordinarily common, though it has come under scrutiny recently. Carman (1994) and especially (2014)

provide systematic defenses of this interpretation and criticisms of Haugeland (2013)’s alternative reading, which identifies
the referent of ‘Dasein’ as a ‘living form of life.’
viii As Carman (1994) puts it, a common set of social proprieties affords the ‘everyday understanding of the world as

publicly available’ that ‘allows us to identify ourselves as individuals in the same world’ (218).
ix Cf. Engstrom (2009: 115): ‘Subjective universality implies… that all subject would agree in their judgment, or share the

same judgment, provided that, with regard to the matter in question, they all had the opportunity to exercise the capacity
to judge that they all share, and provided they all exercised that capacity properly’.
x For a rich discussion of this point, see Zuckerman (forthcoming).
xi Cf. SZ 7-8: ‘One can determine the nature of entities without necessarily having the explicit concept of the sense of

being at one’s disposal.’

xii Cf. the question pressed against Kantian constitutivism by Enoch (2006).
xiii I am here, for the sake of giving exposition of a special part of Heidegger’s account, taking for granted as true

Heidegger’s claims about the finitude, and consequent fragility, of our ontological understanding. In view of the modest
aims of the present treatment, let it suffice to remark that our capacity to claim competence at grasping being is hemmed
on either side: both from limitations owing to the nature of inquiring activity itself, cf. Withy (2013) and (2014), and from
difficulties arising from the heterogeneous nature of its subject matter, cf. McManus (2014).
xiv Dreyfus (1991: 23, 181-2) is not wrong to characterize Dasein’s fallen conformism as a motivated flight from its

‘uncanniness,’ but he mischaracterizes the latter. For he characterizes the flight from anxiety as a flight from the
unsettledness of Dasein’s being that consists in its lacking a nature. But this characterization of the flight requires us to
posit an interest, on Dasein’s part, in having a nature, and a psychological tendency to be disturbed by the lack of it. As my
proposal characterizes the flight as integral to the realization of Dasein’s nature as a capacity to understand being, it requires
no such psychological amendment.
xv I am indebted to Lear (2011) for this understanding of the irony incurred by the pretenses of our activities, and the

importance of such irony for understanding the human capacity for authenticity.
xvi The ‘hollowness’ of our intentional pretense corresponds, in Being and Time, to the ‘possible impossibility’ of existence

in existential death (cf. SZ 262).

24
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