Abstract
Heidegger’s account of the anyone (das Man) is ambiguous. Some interpreters applaud the anyone as the best description of human sociality, while others think of it as an important critique of modern mass society. This chapter introduces the main idea leading up to this volume: Heidegger’s anyone should neither be reduced to its pejorative nor its constitutive dimension. Rather, the ambiguity of the anyone reflects the tension between the constitutive function of norms, rules, and conventions for human action on the one hand, and the critical aspects of conformism on the other. The anyone is the condition of possibility of all human action, but it does not provide its ultimate source of meaning or intelligibility. This evokes the question whether there are standards for our actions beyond the common sense of the anyone. I take this to be the question that Heidegger’s notion of Eigentlichkeit, translated as authenticity or ownedness, wants to address. After distinguishing two controversial dimensions for interpreting authenticity – romantic versus formal and individualistic-atomistic versus pluralistic-social – I will introduce the social dimension of authenticity as the focal point of this volume. In particular, I will identify as the main question whether authenticity can serve as a source of social critique and a motor for social change.
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Notes
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It began with Olafson’s discussion of the anyone in his book Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (Olafson 1987, 144–50). Dreyfus criticized Olafson’s interpretation in his own introduction to Being and Time (Dreyfus 1991, 141–62). The debate culminated in 1994 and 1995 in a back-and-forth between Olafson on the one side and Dreyfus and his disciple Taylor Carman on the other (Olafson 1994a; Carman 1994; Olafson 1994b; Dreyfus 1995; Olafson 1998). For on overview of the debate see (Keller and Weberman 1998). For a recent suggestion to overcome this tension in a unified interpretation see (Christensen 2012).
- 2.
- 3.
All quotations from Being and Time are based on the translation by Stambaugh (Heidegger 1996) but are modified by me.
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Thonhauser, G. (2017). Introduction. In: Schmid, H., Thonhauser, G. (eds) From Conventionalism to Social Authenticity. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56865-2_1
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